A Notable Woman Read online

  No building should be commenced until the general layout of the city was arranged. And the building would be lovely – their proportions please the eye, their design satisfy the artistic judgment. No tramways either. Perhaps even the main roads built with subways for heavy traffic and special paths for pedestrians. And another thing from Rome: the main streets colonnaded so that shoppers were not inconvenienced by a shower of rain.

  Tuesday, 3 March

  The only thing of importance I have done today is to visit the Leicester Galleries and seen Epstein’s Genesis for myself.21 Admittedly at first sight I was shocked but not repulsed. The more I looked the more I marvelled. I am hardly in a position to pass any criticism on the technique of his work, but all the busts in that room possess the same characteristic – i.e. strength, a vitalising staggering power that overwhelms one, as if one had been plunged in cold water. And the work strikes me as being sincere – the manifestation of a magnificent mind. And it is not crude or gross, but rather a beautifying of a crude and gross subject. I could feel the pain of that expectant negress myself. Because his art is not conventional he is condemned. Epstein is setting a totally different standard. That is where we fail: unconsciously we compare his work with standard works (i.e. the Greeks). It is what we have been brought up to do. We learn in our youth what is supposed to be beautiful and what is ugly, so that by the time we have reached the age of discerning these things for ourselves we are already a little biased. Most of us find it so difficult when we meet with something totally different. Epstein sees further.

  To watch those who came to see for themselves was distinctly amusing. Nearly all betrayed a look of shocked propriety, hastily suppressed. ‘We are broadminded of course, this is the twentieth century,’ they tell themselves. One woman murmured, ‘I haven’t seen anyone looking like that – funny sort of figure.’ She was the bulky sort of person who, without her clothes on, would look far funnier than Genesis.

  Friday, 6 March

  Conversation at Aunt Janie’s this afternoon, on Epstein’s work. Mrs H.: ‘Well, there’s something about it … makes you come back for another look. Lovely bit of white marble to begin with. Of course the anatomy’s all wrong. I went with a doctor, that’s how I know. Of course Epstein’s a bit mental. Never washes.’

  Thursday, 12 March

  Lecture on Modern Architecture by Austen Hall. Architecture must express an adventure of the mind. Design must have strength and wit and character. In trying to break away from traditions we are taking the wrong path – must find a way of refreshing the old without eliminating all necessary detail, for some of it rightly applied is very beautiful. There seems no point in doing without a cornice (or as one modern architect does, wear a collarless coat).

  Thursday, 19 March

  Tomorrow is the long talked- and thought-about Foundation Dance at UCL. We are eight: Jo Coates, Dorothy Cargill, Alison Hey, self, Goulden, Tarrant, Gresham and Stoneham. Beginning the evening with the 2nd evening performance of Cochrane’s revue, we go on to dance at college until 5 a.m. God grant the evening will be a success! Tom Goulden is the only boy that knows us all. Tarrant we know to exchange an occasional greeting with. Gresham and Stoneham not at all. Stoneham is causing us all a certain amount of curiosity. I wonder if he will prove very disappointing.

  5.

  A Man Shorter than Myself

  Sunday, 22 March 1931

  Over now! And how marvellous it was, just what I had prayed for. Nothing embarrassing happened. Gresham brought me home in his Morris Minor and I arrived feeling so wide awake and gay that I slipped off my frock for a skirt and blouse and took Prince up the Harrowdene Road, a marvellous hour, dawn. It seemed that we shared a secret, the birds, the dog and me.

  The loveliness of Alison in her slim pink frock and exquisitely dressed fair hair. Cargill in blue, Jo in green, me in yellow, the new chiffon yellow frock that has cost me £8 8s. and down which I spilt lemonade that Tarrant gallantly mopped up with his handkerchief and made little remarks about for the rest of the evening. For instance, when I had finished an ice, ‘Now, have you eaten that cleanly?’

  My beads that Tarrant was hanging round his shirt front …

  From the Revue: ‘I’m a little stiff from tennis …’ ‘I don’t care where you come from …’

  And Valerie is getting engaged to Jack Honour.

  Wednesday, 25 March

  The truth weighed suddenly in on my happiness.

  The best work I can offer is only 3rd rate. I have spent many extra hours on that sheet, and I have put what I thought was my uttermost into its execution. I had dreamed for a moment that it was better than either of my other orders (Doric and Ionic). There was the possibility of my getting an ‘M’, and all I have received is a ‘C’. No good saying that this is better than having to do it again, or that Goulden also has a ‘C’ or that Decorators must be marked more leniently than Architects. Jo has an ‘M’ and I a ‘C’.

  I have terrible visions of the future, of never being able to rise above mediocrity. Of drifting my life away in a dry, dusty office, a dull and stupid spinster who cannot rise out of herself and has not the strength of character to seek adventure.

  The trouble is bare before me. What can I do? Fail and fail and fail again.

  Sunday, 12 April

  Valerie and Jack are having such a tough time. Who could have thought it possible that her mother should be so hidebound, so stupid by convention, that she objects to Jack’s position. He isn’t good enough – not good enough! ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Valerie, ‘his blood relations are much better than mine if we choose to go into it. But of course she won’t, just because his family lost all their money and they have to live in Lonsdale Avenue.’

  I cannot understand Mrs Buck’s point of view. I suppose she had dreams for her daughter, saw her carried away from Wembley by the conventionally magnificent hero amid a shower of envy while she stands proudly by. The pitiful narrow selfishness of it.

  I have just finished reading Bengal Lancer by Francis Yeats-Brown. There is so much food for thought in this book, and it brings up the question of Gandhi’s fight for India’s supremacy. Why shouldn’t India be allowed to rule herself? A vast continent of many different races, surely it could be more ably done by natives who understand the condition and circumstances of the people. What right have we to force Christianity on them? Will they necessarily remain hostile to us if we were to evacuate? Surely an exchange of ideas and trade would still be welcomed? We need spiritual training more than anything.22

  Tuesday, 28 April

  There is Pooh, 30 years old, unmarried. A roamer on the surface of the world and likely to remain one until the long hours of night duty and the restlessness kills him. They are pensioned off at 50, rarely last longer than 55.23 Is that to be all for you, my Pooh? Another 20 years controlling the messages of the world? The pain and pleasures of the peoples of all nations by the lift of your little finger.

  Friday, 8 May

  I wish Ethel would leave me to spend my money in my own way. Trying to make me pay for supper at the church bazaar to which she dragged Margaret and me! It makes me wild – I didn’t want to go. She pretends she dislikes these functions yet really adores them, as happy as anyone there, dashing around in her new blue hat saying how do you do to everyone and feeling immensely important as the wife of the Vicar’s warden. God preserve me from marrying a man who will lead me into such a life. Thank goodness I have a career. It makes me keener than ever to work and work and get away from the terrible ‘Christian’ atmosphere. Anything less Christ-like is hard to imagine.

  It always annoys me the attitude E. takes to my clothes. Am always being told to get something ‘decent’ and ‘good’, but when I take a little time and trouble thinking out a respectable sort of summer ensemble that will be suitable she accuses me of collecting a trousseau and asks when I am ‘introducing him’.

  I do not dress to attract men or any man, I dress entirely to please myself. Funny
though: I was looking at some rather delightful nighties the other day, but passed them by thinking that if I did get any there was no one to appreciate them.

  To travel! But one needs a companion, and the best sort of companion is a man. Even to my socialistic mind I think it would be better to be married – more convenient, double rooms being usually cheaper than singles.

  Sunday, 10 May

  Thinking of ‘Things I Shall Buy My Wife’ (article by Bev Nichols) has given me to consider what I should buy my husband. But beyond a particularly interesting kind of dressing gown which we would choose together and cigarette case I should choose myself, my mind will not rise above tobacco and ties. From there it was all too easy to draw an imaginary picture of the ‘man I shall marry’ so that I feel rather like a schoolgirl again when I decided he must be tall and dark with wavy hair and blue eyes, and I vowed I would die a spinster rather than walk from the altar with a man shorter than myself.

  But I hope he will like music and poetry and the same kind of books as I do, besides being able to drive a car, and that we shall have a sufficiently adequate income to go abroad or roam round England just as we desired. And that at least once a year we would separate for a few weeks. A house in the country because I must have a garden, also an income large enough to enable our employing an adequate number of servants, for I know only too well how soul-destroying domestic trivialities can be.

  Wednesday, 3 June

  A Canadian architect visiting the college spoke to us of the great possibilities that lay before us. There was a germ of greatness in the modern movement. We are no longer hampered, as he was, by the conventional theories of the Royal Academy and RIBA – the war exploded all that.

  Now I am at last clear in my own mind that I do not want the conventional finale to a young girl’s career – her marriage. Let the conventionalists laugh; from now on my career becomes of first importance. I will learn all that I am possibly able. I will build a new world!

  Friday, 26 June

  I feel disloyal when I say things against Daddy and E. Yet I don’t know of anyone among my friends and acquaintances who are on terms of complete and happy understanding with their parents. I think mine are the most tolerant and kind in their way, yet I can confide in neither. Nor have any desire to do so. It seems too much trouble even to hope to make them understand.

  There is Harris (Gus). He has had so many rows with his father that he has been turned from the house and told never to come back again. He has an allowance and is now utterly happy in his newfound freedom. There is Few, whom Joan and I have envied with her independence, her lack of home ties. Then Cargill – she is older, and her parents seem more tolerant, but she is not happy and I have heard her complain of the parental attitude. And Joan – how she grumbles at her home life. And Alison: ‘My mother is very sweet of course, but I like her so much better at a distance.’

  We want complete independence, to be turned out of our homes as the birds turn out their young. How many years since Shakespeare wrote Crabbed Age and Youth? And still we have not learned.24

  Friday, 3 July

  ‘Next time,’ said Aunt Janie to me in the interval this evening as we sat in the two seats I had taken in the upper circle at His Majesty’s Theatre almost immediately behind Valerie and Jack who were celebrating V.’s birthday, ‘Next time I come to the theatre with you I hope it will be with your fiancé.’

  The last time we argued about this I upset a cup of tea all over the tablecloth in the dining room. I will not be made to believe that this is the ultimate reason for a girl’s existence. I will not bind myself to any soul-destroying life when the chance to live so fully lies before me. Yet how much do I want to fall in love!

  ‘There is nothing very remarkable about getting married or having a child,’ writes Ethel Mannin. ‘But when you get down to rock bottom, love is the greatest of all human happiness because it is the only source of lasting, fundamental satisfaction, and there can’t be any lasting delight in beauty, work, travel or anything else unless one’s life is right at the core, and it can’t be right at the core unless one’s love life is right.’25

  Wednesday, 23 September

  4.30 a.m., Have sat talking with brother Pooh since 1.30 a.m. The possibility of my having Phyllis Robinson as a sister in law.

  Sunday, 27 September

  The lights failed this evening. The glow of candlelight stirred a number of indefinable emotions within me. Is the secret of living that we should consider life as a series of episodes, and joining Walt Whitman on the Open Road, treat the body’s death as an accident only, having no cognisance either at the beginning or end of our travels? So that were a World War suddenly to ravage the earth, severing me from the placid security of my parents’ home, scattering my friends, killing those I love, depriving me of my independence and prospect of a career, turning my stable life upside down, even carrying me captive to a strange land – I might look upon it merely as one scene in a play, one stage of a journey on which I am bent solely to garner wisdom in search of beauty and truth.26

  Phyllis Robinson teaches cookery and needlework and could make an excellent housewife. But she is perhaps too fond of her own way. It’s for him to decide. I only hope his loneliness won’t drive him into an alliance he’ll regret.

  Thursday, 29 October

  I fear of inking the sheets again as I write in bed. I have got another ‘1st Mention’, the highest mark, for my Studio work. Although no mark I am afraid will ever again fill me with such amazement and rapture as the ‘1st Mention’ I received for my Classical Composition at the end of last term. After three consecutive Cs I began to think I could not improve. I have now every encouragement to work hard at this career I have so strangely chosen, and I must forget that I would rather be able to write a good book.

  Friday, 20 November

  ‘I live as speedily as I can,’ said Olive Briggs in the cloakroom the other day. ‘I was having a conversation with my mother this morning when she asked me whether I had ever considered the value of my life. Had I ever asked myself should I mind if I died tomorrow? I asked myself that long ago, and I’m quite sure I shouldn’t.’

  I too wouldn’t mind were I to die tomorrow, except that I might hurt the two people I care for more than anyone else in the world. If I could build one monument to the beauty of mankind, if I could write one book of real worth, I should feel I had not lived in vain.

  [Note added later and pinned to her journal:] Olive Briggs became a fully qualified and competent architect and later married the son of a wealthy collar manufacturer. They were both found dead in his car on a lovely part of the Yorkshire Moors – voluntary suicide, from the car’s exhaust. It was widely publicised in the press, with the note they left. He could not face the future, the world seemed to him on the brink of chaos and nothing could save it. She took her life willingly with his. ‘Loyalty,’ she wrote, ‘I believe to be one of the virtues.’

  Sunday, 13 December

  ‘What I believe,’ writes Bertrand Russell, ‘is that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.’ And this conviction is based on an expert knowledge of physical science.

  Sometimes the idea of immortality has appalled me – that there shall never be an end and we must go on living through untold and inconceivable eras. But behind it all there must be some purpose. Why must we suffer so here on earth? Why should one be physically attracted to some people more than others? What is it that makes me believe I shall one day meet someone who will mean more to me than the satisfaction of sexual desires? Why torment us with a little knowledge and then stamp us out? Why are we here?

  Until someone can answer these questions for me I will not surrender my belief in God or in life after death. There are so many questions that will go unanswered, but I cannot believe we shall never know the truth.

  Boxing Day, 1931

  We dined yesterday at ‘Milton’, the home of Ethel’s two unmarried sisters. They belong to a class dying out with their g
eneration, the middle-class gentlepeople who lived in the quiet villages around London before the increase in road traffic developed them into the present revolting suburbs.

  The girls were brought up with the main idea of finding a husband as soon as possible, and during the interim amused themselves at home with all the other young people of their own social standing in the village. They lived in big, comfortable houses run efficiently by a thoroughly domesticated mother and two or three servants. Entertaining was their chief interest: tennis and river picnics in the summer; musical at-homes and dances in the winter. They did a little sewing and possibly helped with the cooking and arranged the flowers, and could devote themselves to parish church work if they wished. No one found it necessary to question the religion offered them. They accepted what had satisfied their parents without demur, and were not troubled by their personalities or concerned with psychology. No passionate discontent urged them to leave home in search of adventure.

  The main road where the trams now go clanking by was a long and lovely lane flanked by tall poplar trees, and I can remember the land ablaze with buttercups on blue May mornings, and two magnificent oak trees whose shade was favoured by lovers at dusk. All have gone. The buttercups were raked up long ago and the ground divided into neat little plots. One is called ‘Dreamcot’, and in another there is a collection of children who scream all day long and keep their dog chained up so that he is continually lifting his voice in complaint.

  But the remnants of the old, gracious families still gather together at Xmas time, pathetic fragments of a society scattered and storm-tossed by the war, and shaken and bewildered by its aftermath. I must go my way. I can never go theirs.

  ‘We are never satisfied with what we have.’ Jean in her Chelsea Arts frock, 1932.

  6.

  The Popular Idea of Love

  Monday, 4 January 1932 (aged twenty-two)

  ‘The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last,’ says Virginia Woolf in her article on Oxford Street.27 ‘It is built to pass. Its glassiness, its transparency, its surging waves of coloured plaster give a different pleasure and achieve a different end from that which was desired by the old builders and their patrons, the nobility of England. Their pride required the illusion of permanence … Today we knock down and rebuild … it is an impulse that makes for creation and fertility. Discovery is stimulated and invention on the alert.’