It’s important to know what this height is, because Laura’s attitude to it is peculiar. In middle age she refused to shop in Budgens because of the way she teetered over the ‘short people’ who went to that store so that they looked at her and spotted that she was buying cider. But how tall exactly was she? She never specifies. Was she a giantess?
The average height of a British woman in the 1950s, when Laura left the Perse Girls, was five feet two inches. Today it is five feet four inches. (According to an article in the Daily Mail, this is partly due to central heating: because we spend less energy shivering as we grow up, we put more energy into growing taller.) But this is still shrimpish. The women I know who are five foot nine don’t talk about their height. If Laura is only that tall, then we learn something about her state of mind – she is suffering from paranoia. At five foot ten, women start to mention it. After six feet some get a worried look at the top of their nose. The tallest woman I know is six foot two – she has a stoop. Was that Laura’s height?
At my train stop I hurried to the stationer’s, and exited minutes later with a small piece of plastic that had cost me 45p. With this item I could take Laura out of her grave and uncurl her as certainly as if she’d been laid in front of me. I had ferreted out her sex, exposed her date of birth, stumbled on her Christian name – now I was going to calculate her measurements. Her fogginess was being blown away.
The solution to the question of her height is in the colourful books from the late 1990s, when she is old. It is on every page. For example, here:
I let Peter imprison me every summer evening in the usual way – abysmal, when others are out and about.
And here:
Peter came upstairs as usual, to make his bed and all that; but changed his mind, had to hurry down to the wickery. He eats so much tinned grapefruit etc. etc.. I just wanted revenge for all the misery he has caused me – turned on the hot taps everywhere I could, so that he would lose all his hot water. I knew he would sit helpless in the wickery, whilst it all ran away. And then he would not be able to flush the pee out of his basin.
The key is the slope of the script. These books were written at night while Laura was lying on her bed, so the tilt of the line represents the curve made as her hand moves across the page, while her elbow (acting as pivot) remains resting on the mattress. In other words, it should be possible to use the angle and length of this downward gradient to estimate the length of the writer’s forearm. (If she were a dwarf, her forearm would be correspondingly small, and the sentences bent to a ridiculous degree; if a giant, hardly any curvature at all.) The 45p plastic object I needed to resurrect Laura from the dead was the same thing Barbara had used to study her handwriting: a school protractor.
I worked at my equations through the night. By dawn I had the answer.
Let S be the average length of a line of a late diary entry.
Let A be the average angle made by this line of text to the horizontal.
If S be taken to represent the secant of a circle with radius ‘length of Laura’s forearm plus the distance from there to the writing tip of her pen’, Laura’s height will be given by
6 × 0.68 × S ÷ (2 × sinA)
The factor 0.68 comes from experiments (conducted on myself) which have found that the length of a person’s forearm is 0.68 times the distance from his or her elbow to the point of the pen:
The factor 6 is due to the well-established empirical fact, as described on the internet, that a person’s height is roughly six times the length of their forearm.
Ergo, putting into the equation the length and angle of Laura’s later diary lines:
Laura uncurled = 6 × 0.68 × [S ÷ (2 × sinA)]
= 6 × 0.68 × [0.13 ÷ 0.0698]
= 7.6
Seven metres, sixty centimetres, or just under twenty-five feet tall.
I snatched up my page and threw it in the fire.
19 Sex
Laura: ‘But was it sex?’ E (‘vehemently’): ‘Of course it was!’
Aged twenty-three
After the Perse School for Girls and the loss of her job at the public library, Laura stopped work on her Pasternakian novels and focused on painting. She went to Luton Modern School and Technical College to study art. The Modern School would eventually become the University of Bedford, but at this time it was still a vocational secondary school, and Laura’s days were hard and busy. She forgot E in Cambridge, and fell so much in love with the etching master that she couldn’t see his nose:
How singular are Mr Stewart’s artistic, temperamental & intellectual qualities. If E couldn’t have my diaries should I die, he can have them.
Such fervour, intellectualism and fire! How surprised my family would be if they knew I bequeathed these precious volumes to an almost total stranger! But it is a question of soul …
Still don’t know what his nose is like.
The night after her first class she slept, thrilled, ‘an artist’s sleep, a mere suspension of consciousness … What a jewel Mr Stewart is (is that his name, or is he Mr Mullin?)’
In the diaries from the sixties, Laura uses her private expression for ‘erotic’: ‘c-feely’. E is ‘c-feely’. The actor who played the Bishop in a production of The Lark by Jean Anouilh that she saw in Cambridge one August is ‘c-feely’. John Gielgud is ‘v c-feely’.
Various crude words suggest themselves for that ‘c’, but ‘c-feely’ isn’t pornographic. Laura isn’t being coy. If she wants to record that she’s thinking about sex (which is quite often) she bursts out with ecstasy:
‘C-feely’ means weeping, high-cheekboned, misunderstood men committing suicide in draughty rented accommodation. ‘C-feely’ is about penetration of the spirit, not the body. It’s not cunt-feely or cock-feely; it’s a word that suggests purity of soul.
Noseless Mr Stewart is c-feely. She hopes he is going to die of consumption. But even she can see that’s a bit too Katherine Mansfield (one of her favourite writers), so she toughens up and calls it tuberculosis:
Can see him getting T.B. – his face is already insubstantial, too ethereal, eyes too bright and feverish. Can see him well in the vast shadowy studio, & himself painting, lonely, hungry, emotional, fired by creating. Wonder if he is married – hope not. He very much genius in the attic, or a dying poet.
You don’t have pornographic sex with a man whose face is disappearing. You ‘sit on the sofa, leaning back against him with my head lying on his shoulder and perhaps just talk a little, occasionally, of deep things’.
With c-feely man, the emphasis is on emotional embrace and safety from popping trouser buttons. She lusts for a man who fails to suppress his lust, but his desire should be metaphorical (e.g. a wild enthusiasm for something artistic, a ‘lust for life’) or allegorical (e.g. migraine, consumption). She’s not particular which; she just wants him isolated and then felled by longing. It must destroy his calm.
But that night after her class with Mr Stewart/Mullin, something went amiss. Laura dreamt of the wrong person: not of the one with the missing proboscis, but of Mr Finch, who teaches life-drawing – a very different box of pencils. Nothing about Mr Finch was insubstantial. He was ‘very nicely set-up. A perfect man’s body – essentially masculine’; ‘lovely steady firm man’s hands, bespeaking a steady mind’.
Laura’s dream about Mr Finch was not ‘c-feely’. It was ‘strangely beautiful’.
The next morning, rather flushed, she spotted him in the canteen, smashing potatoes down onto his gammon and pineapple slice.
‘No glamour in him,’ she records muttering to herself as she hurried past to collect her beaker of water from the cistern. ‘Very dull.’
A week later, Laura’s lust came to a head. Again, her thoughts were on the noseless one; again, her loins went to Mr Finch. ‘A marvellous day!’ she gasped afterwards, crouched over her blue Collins ‘Royal Diary’, still trying to catch her breath. The card boards of this book are napped from excessive handling, which is why they have the texture of f
elt. ‘Think I have discovered something about the mystery of sex – thrilling.’
Was doing life-drawing, Mr Finch came and sat close behind me – in fact, so close that his whole front was pressing up against my back as he stretched out his arm, drawing to explain what he said.
Then a curious thing happened – as that firm, kindly, steady man’s body pressed against mine, a wonderful, tickling, tingling, deep pleasure made itself felt throughout my whole body – perhaps particularly in the region of my lower stomach, but everywhere else too. It had a slight element of discomfort in it, as if I were in fact, being tickled by someone or something inside my body – but it was wonderful before anything else, and a complete novelty in pure physical sensation.
It was a thrilling surprise – and is it sex?
‘Is that feeling I had what the medical books call an “orgasm”?’ she added later. She often sneaked into bookshops during this period to peek through textbooks, to get a sense of what life was up to. ‘Although got no emission with it, if that is involved,’ she noted after one such trip.
If this was sex, a little of its mystery is unravelled, and perhaps the idea of ‘going to bed’ with a man isn’t as silly as I thought – not if it feels like that.
One might be tempted to think that the feeling was just imagination – but my experience of life makes me doubt that – for one thing, it was a strong and definite physical sensation … think this must be a universal part of human nature – the so-far not-understood, carnal-desire.
Laura is not rash, however. She knows she must be careful not to get carried away with this leaning business. ‘Step by step,’ she writes (and the sentence can be read in almost any tone from prissiness to bored harlotry), ‘one gets more & more deeply involved, without noticing it – thus I suppose illegitimate babies are born.’
The odd part is, though she thinks Mr Finch is ‘beautiful’, she does not find him attractive. It is his man-ness that rouses her. This makes her reflect on another ‘curious thing’: ‘how does my body know that it is a man leaning against me, without any mental excitement about him involved – why does one get that feeling with a man, and not, for instance, with the back of a bus seat?’
After carnal-desire there is an unusual three-quarter-inch gap of no writing on the page of the diary. Perhaps it signifies a pause in her thoughts. Perhaps it is a joyous leap.
‘Wanted,’ begins the next sentence, ‘no more than for Mr Finch to go on leaning against me …’
Laura had got the lovely Mr Stewart’s name wrong. He wasn’t called Mr Mullin either: his name was J. Sturgess. And she never, in the two years she flirted with him at Luton, discovered what that J stood for. He was ‘J. Sturgess’ according to the timetable in the hall; he was ‘J. Sturgess’ when she lingered, whistling, in the corridor for the coast to clear, then shot into the staff room to check the tutors’ board; he was ‘J. Sturgess’ on the name tag that could just be (if you crouched down) picked out in the shaft of light slipping through the gap at the top of his locked desk drawer. What did that fish-hook letter refer to? James? Jeffrey? Junior? She never asked.
With all his missing attributes, it’s occurred to me that J. Sturgess didn’t exist. But it’s not true. He’s real. Last week I received an email from him. He’s alive, still a painter, replies only through his wife’s account, and wants nothing to do with me.
I was only at Luton for a short while and cannot remember the students. I am sorry I can’t help you.
Each week on Tuesday Mr Sturgess appeared on his motorbike at Luton College at 5.30 p.m., stayed for precisely sixty minutes, then hurried away ‘as if it has all been a bit much for him’.
Laura brought a couple of ‘Attention-Seeking-Devices’ to trap him. One was a reproduction of Lotte Reiniger paper silhouettes of Swan Lake.
She asked Mr Sturgess’s opinion about these impish coils as soon as possible, ‘so I could look at his wonderful eyes, and hear him talk, & be nice to me. He did talk.’
He declared the cut-outs ‘not art’.
Laura was charmed. Joining forces with a bunch of the teddy boys in the class, she got him stoked up about what was art:
He talked of what E spoke of, reaching after something one can’t get – he described it as ‘agony’. His temperament is wonderfully excitable – gets very worked up – a slight remark can make him ‘blow up’, wax mighty hot & passionate! What fire! He is marvellous. Can see him in my mind’s eye, weeping in his studio because he can’t get what he seeks – the ‘agony’ he spoke of.
Laura began to ‘forget myself, pour out my deeper thoughts. I am the most intellectual and cultured student in the class …’
‘Some of the things he said, I was rather out of my depth,’ she admits defiantly, but ‘I understood him better than the others – they asked such stupid questions – & when they all came up to listen, breathing heavily and open-mouthed, the magic circle was broken & came back to earth with a bump – “’Ow much d’yer get fer yer pintins, Sir?” ’
By the end of her year at Luton, life was peachy. Laura had won a place at Camberwell School of Art to study illustration. She and Sturgess had become friends. On her last day at the college she put on her favourite striped suit for him and they walked out of the class together to say goodbye in the car park.
Luton Technical College, at the time Laura was a student. ‘Of the “Toppled Cornflake Boxes School” of school design,’ writes Dr Jonathan Foyle, formerly of the World Monuments Fund. (© The Francis Frith Collection)
‘Be careful on your bike, gifted people have more to lose,’ she shouted as Sturgess throttled up, his face ‘rather young and thin under the helmet’. ‘If you ever want a free lunch, come to visit me in London!’
‘I’ll avail myself much of the opportunity,’ he shouted back, noselessly.
Sturgess was twenty-seven years old, had been married for two years, was vegetarian (‘my tastes are so in common with his, it is wonderful’), and sped off ‘as a sealed package at the registrar’s office’.
20 What a queer set up
Felt particularly bitter against the college today. They have given me only 42 for my fairground comp. And 43 for life.
Aged twenty-two
‘Mr Ellis
at me.
I am physically afraid of the man, he is so
& so
& so
1961, July 14th. Hardback pocketbook, parcel-paper binding. Glue rotted. Text with numerous signs of distress: crossings-out, inability to stick to the line, erratic letters. The sentences on the final page suddenly small and backed up, suggesting Laura hadn’t noticed the end of the book approaching so rapidly, scrabbled desperately to avoid hitting it, staved off disaster by snatching up stray sheets of paper from around her desk until finally the dreadful story is finished, and she is forced to make the leap into the next book. Seven folded inserts are stuffed inside the back cover.
This diary begins brightly. The opening page is Laura’s last day at Luton Art College. A week later she sets off for Liverpool. She’d landed a two-month summer post as a housekeeper/cook with a family in the Wirral: light cleaning, two meals a day. The advert had appeared in The Lady.
But from the start there was something unsettling about the arrangement. Even the journey up, through the Pennines, felt oppressive: ‘breathtaking scenery, such colossal heights’, such ‘depths – great cliff-like hills and wooded steeps’; the train sucked her into tunnels, snorted her along under mountains, spat her into new valleys; the world outside ‘overpowered me, gave me claustrophobia’, the sky ‘filled with dazzling white light, the sun in its zenith’.
At Liverpool station she was met, not by her supposed employer, Mr Ellis, but by a mysterious ‘girl model’, a ‘beautiful & very nice, not made-up’ Spaniard. The young woman appeared not to speak English, and drove her silently through the Mersey Tunnel (‘marvellous feat of engineering – well relieved to get out of it’). Laura could not find out why the previous employee had left u
nexpectedly and suddenly. It was not unreasonable that Mr Ellis had chosen her from other potential candidates, because Laura had done housework jobs before and had references from previous employers. But weren’t there any local girls who wanted work? Why pick someone who lived 160 miles away?
The ‘girl model’ continued driving silently.
Were adverts in The Lady always safe?
Laura describes the house as ‘surrounded by vast empty open stretches of sands’ that slope away towards a ‘thin blue blade’. At high tide the sea comes right up to the walls, so that it appears to Laura that the house ‘floats on the water’. It is, she writes, ‘ghostly with wind’.
Mr Ellis turns out to be ‘rather a “small” person, & rather conceited & complacent’. He has a ‘man’s lack of graciousness’. His wife, ‘an oddish woman’, claims to be a fashion designer and a painter; to Laura’s astonishment she does not immediately try to befriend Laura. ‘Her lack of feeling & interest for a fellow artist incredible.’
At my daughter’s christening two years ago, an ex-schoolteacher of mine, John Rogers (a theologian and author of The Basic Bible), gave an address in which he argued that the solution to the Trinity was that it was not a trinity at all, but a two-and-a-halfity. The Father and the Son are nouns, explained John, stepping away from the lectern and coming down the aisle in his enthusiasm about this point, but the Holy Spirit is a verb; it is ‘the act of intercourse’ between Father and Son.
Fresh from J. Sturgess, ‘leaning’ drawing masters and the discovery of sex, Laura in this 1961 book believes in Art in the same spirit: it is the ‘act of intercourse’ between the artist and the Essence.
A Life Discarded Page 9