*
It takes weeks and drives Millicent to distraction. Alfred is ill at first with what turns out to be pneumonia. It suits him to make a slow convalescence and it is a month before he is up and dressed. Millicent is obliged, at the beginning, to take time off work to look after him, which she resents, but there is no alternative. Robert dislikes Alfred so much that he can hardly bear to be in the same house never mind the same room, and things become fraught between him and Millicent. It doesn’t help matters that in March Hitler annexes Austria and even Millicent cannot go on being so sure that there will not be a war. Eventually, in May, she gives her brother an ultimatum: either he leaves by 1st June or she will write to Ethel and tell her where he is.
*
2 June
Bliss to come home and find Alfred at last gone. Last night, he asked if he could ‘borrow’ £20 to send to Ethel. I let him have it, though it is a great deal of money and all I had in the house. I don’t care where he’s gone, I don’t want to know, it is enough that he has. There was no note of thanks, no token of appreciation for all the weeks he has been an uninvited and unwanted guest. And I am quite sure my £20 has not gone to his poor wife. What on earth has made him turn out as he has done? I cannot understand it and am not going to waste any more time trying. He is convinced luck is always running against him but that is simply untrue. I don’t feel in the least sorry for him. Instead, I despise him. If ever he turns up again I will refuse to take him in. I was even contemplating moving house at one point, though I love this house, so that he would never know my new address. He would then only have George or Tilda to go to and they – well, in George’s case, Esther – would know how to deal with him.
1 July
Robert was called to a meeting today about plans for evacuating London’s children in the event of war, which he says is now seriously expected. At any rate, the authorities must think we are next on Hitler’s list. The logistics of such an evacuation are enormous and I don’t need Robert to point that out. I thought about all the poor children on our case-load and wondered how on earth they would survive being taken to the country, and who would cope with them and the state most of them would be in when they got there. Then I thought of Tilda’s children and wondered what she will do. Surely she can make private plans and will not need to rely on government schemes to get her children to safety. I must talk to her about it.
18 July
Finally got round to mentioning evacuation to Tilda. She says she dreads it, but if war comes her brood must be got out of London. And since the twins are so very young she will have to go with them, though her nursing experience might be needed, and she would want to offer it. She wondered about going to Brighton, where Esther and George have plenty of room to take her in, but we both realised the south coast would be a dangerous place to be. In any case, George and Esther are thinking of moving to her parents’ farm which, since her father’s death, has been managed by a cousin who has himself just died. It felt dreadful to be having this kind of conversation, quite unreal, but I know now it is all too real. Tilda asked what I will do, and I was so surprised that she thought I would do anything but what I am already doing that I couldn’t think. I expect there will be plenty to do. Robert, of course, will join up immediately. He has always said he would. I can’t understand why, after his experience at the end of the last war. I don’t think men who fought in the last war should have to fight in this one. Robert laughed when I said it was not fair, but I meant it. What about George, what will happen to him? Surely he is too old to be conscripted and would never volunteer. What about Charles, though? What about Albert and Alfred and Michael?
1 August 1938
FOR ONCE, ROBERT has been the one to suggest a holiday. I can hardly believe it but am very glad. He says it may be our last chance before war is declared and that we should seize it and enjoy it. What a gloomy reason for a holiday, but I shall ignore it and simply be happy about the opportunity. I don’t care where we go but would like it to be somewhere warm.
*
They do not, however, go somewhere warm. Instead, they go to Norfolk and hire a sailing-boat for the first week. Robert turns out to be a good sailor, but Millicent doesn’t take to sailing, and the weather is poor. The second week is better. They stay in a cottage at Wells-next-the-Sea and the sun shines and they swim and take long walks along the coast. But Robert is ‘moody’ and given to morbid thoughts which he wants to share with her but which she does not want to hear. He also insists on listening to news bulletins on the wireless and all the news is bad until the end of September.
*
29 September
Why will Robert not smile? It is such wonderful, happy news, but when we heard it he just shrugged and stared out of the window at the sea. I told him they might as well have broadcast the news that war had been declared for all the pleasure he seemed to be taking in Mr Chamberlain’s peace guarantee. Why can’t he rejoice like everyone else? I said, rather meanly I know, that maybe it was because he cannot bear to have been proved wrong and me to be right. He groaned at that, and told me not to be so silly. Hitler, he says, will never keep his word and all we have gained is a breathing space. It is almost as if Robert wants a war. We packed up in silence and when the car was loaded went for a last walk along the shore. It was so quiet and beautiful, the sun just setting and the whole sea turned pink. I wanted to stay in Norfolk because there we were properly a couple in a way we still can never be in London. We have been together so long now: we are an old married couple who just happen not to be married.
15 October
It has happened. For years, I’ve expected it, while taking every care, and now it has, though I can’t yet be sure. But my Visitor is never late, or never more than a day or two, and now it is a week overdue. And there are other signs – a soreness in my breasts – though no sickness. I have said nothing to Robert, but he is very watchful and aware and keeps an eye on my cycle, which I have never quite liked, because he worries so. I ought to confess my fears and discuss with him what should be done. It is deceitful to keep my suspicions from him.
21 October
Still no Visitor. Why am I not frightened? I should be, if I am going to have an abortion. The very word has always chilled me and of course I don’t know how to procure one safely. I’ve always thought Daphne would know, but I haven’t seen her for ages and now that we are no longer as close as we once were it will be embarrassing to ask her. Tilda would be no use. She didn’t arrange one for herself and with her newly strong Christian beliefs, she would be horrified. What will I do? The strange thing is that I am not frightened and I know that is because I am not really contemplating getting rid of this baby, if baby it is. I want it. I feel excited, even thrilled, as though I have a delicious not a dreadful secret. I will be an unmarried mother with all that this means, and I do not care. Am I mad, or brave?
20 November
A second period missed and I feel so, so different. I ought to see a doctor but I can’t do that without telling Robert, so I will tell him tomorrow, Friday night, then we will have the weekend to discuss this momentous news. However foolish of me, I hope and pray he will not be horrified.
22 November
We are still hardly speaking. Never before have we gone so long after an argument without making up our differences in some way or another. I don’t think Robert slept last night after I had told him and I certainly didn’t. I suppose I thought that after the initial shock he would become as excited and thrilled as I am and, like me, say he didn’t give a damn what people would think. But no. He went immediately into a panic about how to get rid of it, assuming I, too, would be thinking only that. Then he wondered aloud how this mistake, this accident, could have happened and went near to implying that I had been careless! He even chided me for not going back to the Marie Stopes clinic to check that the cap still fitted – and that made me cry, it was so cruel. He was sorry then, and said it was only anxiety making him talk like that. But still h
e began again on how could we get rid of ‘it’, and who did we know who might help. He even got a pencil and a piece of paper and said let’s think hard who might know where to go. When I said he could put his pencil and paper away because I wanted to have this baby, he was thunderstruck. He asked me if I was joking. I said no, and that was when we began quarrelling in earnest. He said he couldn’t let me ruin my life. Then he tried to persuade me that because I am pregnant I am not in my right mind, not capable of being rational, and I exploded. How we both will resolve this I do not know.
1 December
I went to see a doctor today, without informing Robert. I have never been to him before, indeed I have never been to any doctor in London, which surely must show how healthy I am. I chose the nearest surgery to our house, not having any other reason for selecting a doctor. I have passed his consulting rooms every day for two years, his brass plate is always shining and there is a window-box always full of geraniums in the summer and it is an altogether bright and cheerful-looking house. The doctor is quite cheerful too, a small rather portly man, middle-aged and brisk. I was cowardly and said my name was Mrs Rigg and that I thought I was pregnant. He examined me and said yes, about three months, and congratulated me. My eyes filled with tears but I managed to smile and I think he put my emotion down to joy. He said I was fairly old for a first-time mother but that I seemed exceptionally healthy and fit and he was sure all would be well if I looked after myself and took care. Then he wanted to discuss where I would have the baby, and recommended a particular nursing home. I am to go back to him in a month and he will book me in. He charged 10s. I don’t know if that is expensive or not. The baby is due in May.
2 December
Robert saw me taking one of the iron tablets the doctor prescribed. He looked hopeful for a minute, as though I might be taking something to get rid of my baby, or so I imagined, and I despised him. Before he could ask, I volunteered the information, in a contemptuous tone, that I was taking an iron tablet to enrich my blood during pregnancy and that I had been to a doctor and had it confirmed. He looked aghast, and then sighed, and said we couldn’t go on like this and I said no, we certainly could not – what did he want to do, leave me and go back to Doreen? And he said, and he was right, that this was a stupid thing to say and that I should know he would never desert me. Then I cried. I seem to be crying an awful lot. But Robert was his old kind self this time and held me close and calmed me down and then we talked in a different way. He said he had a plan. It had just come to him in the night that what I could do was take his name by changing my own surname by deed poll and then the child could have our joint name perfectly legitimately. I cannot think straight.
6 December
Robert has another plan. He has applied for a job in Manchester. It is not such a good job, but if he gets it, we can move there and start afresh, pretending to be married. There are difficulties, but we have thought everything through. We will both give in our notice as soon as he hears that he can have the Manchester job and then everything will move fast. I will sell this house and we will go to Manchester at the very first opportunity, while I am still mobile. I have hardly put any weight on and don’t yet look the least pregnant and haven’t been sick. People at work comment that I look blooming and even Mavis, though she is always suspicious about everyone’s looks, constantly suspecting people are ill or hiding some secret, even Mavis has guessed nothing. Once we give our notices in of course the rumours will begin, and the interrogation.
12 December
No definite confirmation from Manchester yet. With the Christmas holidays coming up it may be the New Year before we hear, which is a pity. Meanwhile, Robert has inquired about how deed poll works, and it looks as if it will be surprisingly easy for me to become Rigg. I wish it was not such a horrid name. I don’t like the sound of Rigg in the least and have always liked King. I wish it was usual for men to change their name on marrying and not women. I would have thought Robert should be jolly pleased to become a King.
1 January 1939
What a year this is going to be! I seem to smile all the time and I feel wonderful. Tilda says she has never seen me look so well and happy, and I was tempted to tell her the reason which I will have to tell her sometime anyway, and soon, but I held back, wanting to be able to present to her with a fait accompli as far as Manchester is concerned.
7 January
Robert came home very preoccupied tonight. He says he knows I hate him talking about such things and he tries not to, especially of late, but there is no doubt there is going to be a war. All kinds of preparations are in hand, as they have been for some time. Air-raid Precautions have been organised, and the evacuation plans are near to being finalised. He says I would have to leave London anyway, but that Manchester will not be a very clever choice of city because the industrial north will be bombed as much as London. What a terrible time to bring a child into the world, he said, and was all gloom. He wonders where I should go when war does come and he did what he always does in such situations, get out his dratted pencil and paper to make a list of possibilities. One of them is that I should go to the Russos in America. He pointed out I’d been invited often enough, and in his last letter Mr Russo said if war came and I needed what he called ‘a haven’ he would welcome me. Then he said something so shocking I couldn’t believe it. He said it wouldn’t much matter about what the job in Manchester turned out to be like, if he gets it, because of course he’d be joining up and would be in the army. But I’m having our baby, I said, you can’t join up. His reply was that lots of women would be having babies, so this couldn’t be an excuse or we’d have no fighting force. I stared at him.
How can I not be upset? How will I manage on my own, about to have a baby, or just having had it, if war is declared and Robert goes off at once when he does not have to. He can at least wait until he is conscripted. I accused him of showing off by wanting to play soldiers, but he said I was forgetting he’d seen war and knew the horror of it. Hitler, he says, is a madman who has to be stopped, and he isn’t going to wait to be told to do his duty. I don’t care. His duty is to me and his baby. He says I am utterly self-centred. Well, in this respect, I am. He will hear about Manchester tomorrow.
8 January
Still no word about Manchester.
12 January
Robert has got the Manchester job. I don’t know whether I am glad or sorry. I must give in my notice. Mavis will want to know why I am leaving. She will express astonishment, saying she thought I was very happy in my job, which I am, and will ferret about for reasons. What shall I say?
15 January
Mavis expressed astonishment, as I expected, but then said, Oh, I might leave myself, get out of London. How odd. At any rate, I have given my notice in. Things are moving!
*
And there, on this happy-sounding note, the diary entries stop for the longest period in the whole eighty years, a matter of just over three months. As usual when something devastating happens in her life, Millicent does not choose to tell her diary, but in this case it may be because she was ill for a time and incapable of writing. Few clues are given, when on 30 April she does resume her diary-writing, as to exactly what has happened, but from the entry on 15 May – ‘Sad day. Could not help but think of my son and how I would have welcomed the darling into the world’ – it is obvious she had a late miscarriage, or late enough for the sex of the baby to be clear. Since she’d made such a point of being proud of her own health, and since there had been not a sign of any other trouble, perhaps she had an accident of some sort. Many years later, she does mention her terror of crossing icy roads and adds ‘It is not surprising I have this fear, considering what once happened and how I nearly died’, so maybe she slipped on some icy road, or was knocked down by a car that skidded. At any rate, she lost the baby, and she stayed in London, so presumably the move to Manchester was never made.
The diary entries for May, June, July and August 1939 are minimal and concerned only wi
th what Millicent is doing, not what she is thinking or feeling. She doesn’t seem to be doing much, but maybe she was convalescing and not allowed to. There is no holiday that year, though she says the doctor thinks it would do her good to get away, and Robert agrees, but she writes that she has no energy and just wants to stay at home. It is sad to read her listless little notes – ‘Managed to walk to the park. Sat and watched the ducks.’ She reads a lot, but then she always has done. A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel (published 1937) makes an impression on her, which may be further proof that she herself had an accident (the doctor’s wife in this novel has a fall on a rotten bridge, loses her baby, and as a consequence cannot have any more children). There is no mention of any important events that year – Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example – and no apparent awareness that the war Robert had constantly predicted was now very near. Millicent is locked in her own unhappy, restricted world, until September 1939.
Diary of an Ordinary Woman Page 24