A Notable Woman Read online

  Monday, 2 June

  I have the inferiority complex, the hump and indigestion and a few other things. Yesterday Joan Hughes beat me 6–0 6–0 in the Open Singles. I know she’s good, but damn it all – not a single game! And after my prayers and that gay, calm confidence I instilled into myself. If I think of it too much I find myself asking absurd and desperate questions. Is there a God? Does he care or hear us?

  I quite see that the best players don’t wish to play with weaker ones. Naturally it spoils their game. They will see that score, and all the committee, and they are the people that matter most, and they will say, ‘Good Lord, Jean’s even worse than we thought she was.’

  Yet why should I let a tennis tournament so dampen my spirits? Only that I had hoped that by this year I might have proved to other people that there was some strength in me. The whole world is a dark and murky place and I am afraid I shall never rise to the heights I dream of, afraid that I shall settle down to an irritating existence of domesticity and the narrow little life of the average woman. But I shall always have the chance to write.

  I have two more tournaments to play yet. And I must beat Elsie Warden.

  Thursday, 5 June

  Tonight Leslie Northam and I played Kit Rayner and Ken Matthews. They won the first set 6–0, and I thought, ‘Hell! This is going to be a repetition of Sunday’s fiasco.’ Then something in me stirred and I cannot quite explain it, but I started a sort of auto-suggestion in my mind. I brought my willpower into full force. We won the first two games – they only just beat us 7–5.

  I have been thinking a lot today. The idea took a final shape in my mind as I walked to Sudbury Town. I am getting soft. My position at the office as daughter of the boss is too comfortable, and I am able to do too much what I like. It will never do: I cannot be a subordinate to Pop in that way, but as his partner I can do immense things.

  They need doing badly too. He has worked the business to a certain point and here we have stopped. To be any use at all I must get my Associate RIBA certificate, and I shall never do that on my own at the office. I haven’t the ability and there is no one to coach me for the exams. I have decided – I want to go into another office, a large, modern and well-organised affair where they will help me achieve my work for the Intermediates. I shall see how a well-run office ought to be managed. Daddy is getting old and I feel it is essential that I get on with things.

  Sunday, 21 June

  Have just been glancing through my last entry and since then I have been brought to realise that it must be a school, a day school. I have written for prospectuses to the London University, Central School of Arts and Crafts, the Northern Polytechnic, the Regent Street Poly – it is the latter which I think I shall really prefer.

  Tuesday, 17 July

  And so another period of my life ends. Two years at the Ealing Art School. Today for the last time I bent over a drawing board in Room 15, and for the last time walked those bare stone corridors and clattered down the stairs. I said goodbye to Mr Patrick, waved farewell to Mary Moyes and Elise Folkes. I am not sorry it is over, the time I spent was but a stepping stone to something better.

  Wednesday, 30 July

  We eventually decided on the London University and I went up for an interview. It was most satisfactory, and I start on 6 October.

  Now if I can only convince Daddy of my seriousness. I can encourage him to hang on for another five years. Then I will return to him and do all the things that need doing so badly. With all his long years of experience to help back me up I should be able to make a splendid thing of this. What a fool I have been! If I can only make him realise that he has someone here on whom to rely he will feel encouraged to carry on for a little longer. And Oh God I must not fail at the University.

  And all my friends – they have not the first idea of the direction or depth of my ambition.

  Monday, 4 August

  The early passion of the garden is blown, and heavy rains have beaten the colour from the roses. Delphinium, larkspur and foxglove have died, Aaron’s rod is beginning to throw golden spikes up the border by the fence, phlox, gladioli, geranium and dark red antirrhinum bloom among a profusion of foliage washed deep green. Peaches are being gathered and lavender is nearly ripe for picking, and there is a whisper of autumn in the wind.

  Thursday, 7 August

  Supposing Daddy had been a singer or a cook, or anything but an architect, and I still had my income when I was 21, I dream of how I would plan my life:

  Freelance journalism.

  Music.

  Cooking.

  Dressmaking.

  Gardening.

  Golf.

  I would get up at 7.30 for 8.30 breakfast every morning except Sundays. From 9 to 10.30 I would practise – singing, piano lessons, elocution too perhaps. Then the rest of the morning to English study and writing, and in the afternoon dressmaking, gardening or cooking. I would drive a car and play golf for recreation, and there would be social obligations to fit in in the afternoon and evenings. Yet I don’t know. I think I would rather go the way I have chosen. Something more reliable and strengthening about it.

  Sunday, 5 October

  A national disaster has occurred – the R101 has crashed.17 40-odd people burned to death (all men). Terrible, ghastly, tragedy stark and dramatic. The papers will be full of it, much sympathy will be expressed for the remaining relatives, the men will be made heroes and their widows provided for for life, there will be whip-rounds and memorials and long, stirring speeches, and all the world will be horribly thrilled.

  But I know of worse tragedies that go on every day unnoticed: patient, plodding workers scraping all they can together so that their children may have a better start than they had. I cannot forget that timorous little creature who came into the office for an education grant for her daughter. She was so shrunken and nervous and terribly anxious to get the best for her girl. She confessed to having had to borrow £4 for clothes. The patience of these people. What do they ever get from life?

  Friday, 10 October

  Thoughts accumulated during the past week: that in no other place apart from university can one be so completely and unintentionally ignored. I may hate the newness of it all, and the hardness of it, yet I must fight on. If I am to be the only girl in a class of boys, then let me get to know those boys. Already two have shown signs of friendliness.

  Saturday, 6 December

  Joyce Coates: A charming little person, rich, with a good taste in clothes and attractive manners. More in her perhaps than at first might be imagined.

  Joan Hey: She is in the act of growing up. In fact she is only just beginning. Nonetheless she is easy to get on with and likeable, and has plenty of willpower.

  Elsie Few: A most interesting personality. There is something of the texture of satin or cream about her, and above all she is an artist.

  Thursday, 1 January 1931

  So seldom have I succeeded in keeping any New Year Resolutions that now mine are rarely made in January, but at odd sudden moments in unconventional places.

  But I have recently reached a conclusion on a point I have been considering for several weeks. I inherited from my mother the desire to write. This desire has haunted me from the time when I first scrawled the alphabet in coloured letters across a clean white page. I must write, even now, with my career chosen and my training begun. It is in my blood and will not be subdued. To satisfy this desire I am going to keep this Journal which I shall make as entertaining as possible. I am learning truths too, as I grow older, that I am unable to discuss at present, and I fear that with the coming years ideas will be forgotten unless I make an effort to keep them. So let this be my New Year Resolution – that I leave behind me something worth reading, which even if it doesn’t attract strangers, may at least surprise my friends and relations.

  Saturday, 17 January

  Pooh went back to work today.18 Our lives are made up of meetings and farewells. Think of the meals now! Once more ‘they two’ and m
e.

  Ethel and I will never be more than superficially good friends. We are mentally opposed. I always feel that anything she does for me is rather a nuisance. When I was in bed the other day with a cold I felt the most brutal burden. She won’t read: how much she has missed. And if a discussion is started on anything more advanced than the latest family scandal she shuts up like an oyster at first signs of opposition.

  But it isn’t her fault any more than it is mine. I admire all she has done for us tremendously, and she runs this house as if it were a ship. And she has looked after and cared for Daddy. But oh this banging about in the mornings when she makes herself do the housework she’s not feeing equal to. This agitation when a guest is late for a meal, this pride in her home. There is no sort of adventure about it, and she is too practical, too afraid of sentiment. I wish sometimes she might suddenly leave dusting the drawing room one morning and take a bus to Kew because Spring seemed suddenly to have arrived and she wanted to see young, green growing things.

  Since I have so many more advantages than she has ever had and I have learned so much more from books than she has, I must be the one to regulate the friendship so that we do nothing to hurt each other. If she’d had the education, good school, made to work, college, a degree, travel. All desires outside her circle have been repressed by the atmosphere in which she was brought up – Wembley all her life.

  I feel brutal writing these things, but … Mummy used to read Shelley and Keats and Tennyson. She’d have loved Rupert Brooke and Alfred Noyes and Walter de la Mare. Poetry is never something that has taken a very big place in Ethel’s life.

  Saturday, 24 January

  Tonight we played ‘cutthroat’ and Daddy won (1s. 5d.),19 and we half-jokingly urged him to put it to Dr Barnardo’s. But this he firmly refused to do. ‘It is wrong,’ Ethel said as he went to do the greenhouse. ‘He plays for what he can get.’ And later, when we were discussing the possibility of visiting Wisley Garden, a good Sunday outing in the car, she said, ‘But we never go out in the car. I never had a run all last summer. Daddy just will not use the car except to get him somewhere definite. We never use it and we never shall.’ So she too finds Daddy a little disappointing. There are times when I am ashamed of him – yet I love him. He came from his Saturday night bath very pink and clean, with his white hair fluffed in a halo round his head. I think I love him like that best of all. If in 5 years I manage to become an Associate of RIBA he will be 70. 70. Oh why wasn’t I born sooner?

  I was smitten earlier this evening with a tremendous idea. I would write a book within the next 5 years and see if I could get it published. And here I am going to quote from Mr John Connell, for I must confess his book was partly responsible for the inspiration:

  ‘It can be no tale of carefully rounded edges, of neatly massed effects, a thing of plot or climax. Somehow life is not like that – it is not symmetrical, measured and finished. The weaver of the pattern doesn’t seem to care for neatly tasselled ends and pretty bows – it is all very rough and ragged. Yet through it all there seems to run a purpose and an idea, a kind of guiding line.’

  And so I conceived the idea of writing a book on similar lines.

  Friday, 30 January

  This morning I felt foolish talking to Mr Ashworth. I kept imagining that he was wondering why on earth I had chosen Architecture and not Decoration, or in fact either.

  On our way back from tea today Joan Hey and I passed the little 2nd-year decorator Philips. She was alone and her eyes were red and swollen and I heard her sob as she passed us by. ‘I am so sorry for her,’ said Joan. ‘She’s so dull and inanimate, but I expect inside she wishes she were dashing and attractive. Everything is against her. She has the ugliest figure.’

  It is true. And I am sorry too. I know that feeling only too well.

  Saturday, 31 January

  This book I am going to write. I shall start with my schooldays and fill the first chapter or phase of the book with as eloquent and entertaining a description of PHC as possible. Then those bitter years, a very light and rather cynical sketch but quietly indicating growth of thought and so on, and I shall write I think in diary form. I must suppress all egoism. It’s going to be difficult. And then student days.

  Lacrosse this afternoon, played in a bitter wind. I’m not very good but I love it – the tang in the air, the movement, the superb cleanness of it all. I wear my gym tunic under my coat now and don’t bother to change. It amuses me to see the sly, curious glances of the gentlemen in the direction of my knees as they become exposed with the flapping of my coat.

  Tuesday, 3 February

  Copy of letter to my father

  Darling –

  While I’ve got this still in my mind –

  I’ve been thinking such a lot – I am really worried about you. You are the absolute centre of my future: without you I should be like a rudderless ship; all my inspiration would die. So it is absolutely essential that you keep well. And as I said the other night, you won’t keep well if you have to worry about the business.

  Now the business is far more important than me – it even matters perhaps more than any of us. I can be of no practical use to it for at least five years, and even then I shall be very young and inexperienced to take up any sort of responsible position.

  The only way out that I can see is for you to ensure the future of the business firm by taking a partner as soon as you can. You must have someone reliable, trustworthy and hardworking in the office. I am praying day and night that we may find the right man. I know it’s damn difficult – but don’t let W.S.B. do you down any more! If only you could find the right person to buy a share of your practice, and for you to leave your share to me in your will, then I shall not feel I am undertaking an impossible task as I do sometimes in moments of depression. And your health will benefit by easing your mind.

  Sunday, 8 February

  In bed with one of these blasted colds again – what a miracle and a blessing is the wireless. I think that with a good portable set, a library subscription, fountain pen and paper and ink, I should enjoy being bedridden. Through these mediums I could explore the world. I lay in the semi-darkness listening to some vaudeville in which The Three Ginx in harmony gave a delightful performance and Ann Penn contributed some very clever impersonations, particularly one of Gertrude Lawrence in the song she sang with Noël Coward in Private Lives.

  Friday, 20 February

  To and fro swings the pendulum: to have my hair cut or leave it long? On Tuesday Elsie Few put it to a vote in the studio, and most people seem to think it would improve my appearance rather than otherwise. ‘It would make you look so much more charming Jean,’ said Few. ‘Really we want the world to be as beautiful as possible – you owe it that. And think – you’ll have all the young men simply flat my dear.’ But Cargill objected. I respect Cargill’s opinion. ‘Don’t you have it done Pratt – it looks jolly nice as it is.’ And today Joyce Coates rather surprised me by saying, ‘Don’t you have your hair off Jean – I shan’t have any more to do with you if you do.’

  And of course at home from Ethel: ‘Oh, you would be very foolish if you did it.’ ‘You’ll be no daughter of mine,’ says father magnificently.

  Cheap – that is of what I am afraid, looking cheap. But if I were cheap I should be so now with it as it is. Outwardly it cannot make anything but a superficial difference: it is what I am that matters. So I shall have it done!20

  Saturday, 28 February

  God – what dream is this? We study the architecture of Rome, and the vaguest fantasy rises before me: a dream of the City Beautiful.

  To build a perfect city: buy an area of lovely untouched English country somewhere in the South. Plan first two straight wide roads, one running from N to S, the other from E to W, and where they intersect is the centre of our city. On the corners should be erected the most important buildings, i.e. the police station, GPO, council offices, fire station, possibly a bank etc. Shops should range on either side of the
two main roads, the front portions being built out with flat roofs that could be used by restaurants in fine weather. The residential area should be built at the back of these streets, and all designs would have to be essentially twentieth century. No faked Tudor houses or ugly Georgian facades.

  Fireplaces for coal fires would only be allowed as a luxury. For all domestic and industrial purposes gas or electricity should be used, and each house could only have one chimney stack.

  Everywhere there should be as much light and air and clean lines as possible. And all designs would have to be passed by a Committee of men selected for their knowledge in good construction, hygiene and, most important, their appreciation of real beauty and proportion such as the Greeks knew.

  Garages and hotels should be built at the four entrances to the town. Large recreation grounds provided for the inhabitants, sports grounds for tennis, golf, cricket, rugger and all athletics. Public baths built to Roman ideals: open-air baths for the summer, covered in for the winter. A gymnasium, dance halls, skating rink. Everything should be provided for public amusement: one or two good theatres, cinemas – everything for a residential people, no industries or factories of any kind would be permitted. This should be a city where the more successful workers of London might live, driving in their cars or going by the specially prepared railways to London each day and back at night. So that London may eventually be left to its fogs and dirt and manufacture, salesmanship and business. A rather preposterous ideal, because I doubt whether London’s entertainments might ever be excelled. But might it not be possible, if the world’s finest financiers were gathered together and formed a syndicate or something. And then the world’s best engineers and greatest architects and artists to plan and design the Perfect City?

  There is no reason why it should not be international: let its inhabitants be as cosmopolitan as is reasonable. Possibly England has the best climate in the world, for all our complaining. To promote world peace we may not stand aloof and exclude any other country, and this applies to every race.