Diary of an Ordinary Woman

by Margaret Forster

  It is in these years that Millicent does seem at her most ordinary, very much the average early middle-aged woman of her times and her diaries reflect this. But what is far from average is her obvious financial independence and security. Money is not mentioned often in her diary and when it is, always in a veiled sort of way. She never reveals what these investments are which provide her income, nor does she state what that income amounted to. She seems to push aside all inquiries as to her financial position (as she did when the solicitor, Mr Purcell, asked) and fobs people off with vague references to having ‘enough’ money, or not needing to worry about money. Since she is such a careful woman, I suspect she had a separate account book in which she recorded everything to do with it and felt her diary was not the appropriate place to do so. But there is one entry, made when she bought her house, which would seem to indicate that she had inherited shares in the National Provincial Bank. I am told these shares were an excellent buy in the 1930s and went on increasing in value right up to the 1960s. How many Millicent had of them, of course, we are never told. Like many of her generation, she clearly believed talking (even, in her case, to her diary) about money was somehow not quite nice.

  Again and again, she writes during the postwar period that she has nothing of interest to record, nothing to say. Even the doings of the twins no longer seem to her worthy of relating in detail, and there is very little mention of her teaching. The weather, to which she once scorned to give space, gets a lot of attention (especially in the hard winter of 1946/7 when the Thames froze over, and for a while water had to be got from a standpipe in the street). She thinks, by 1950, that her diaries for the previous three years have hardly been worth keeping, and she is not so wrong. Their function, she observes with some bitterness, is to reassure her that the days and weeks have not just vanished into a hole. In spite of her part-time job, and in spite of looking after the twins, she has an oppressive sense of marking time.

  But then, in the spring of 1951, there is the first indication that Millicent may lift herself out of the rut she has fallen into. In April, her nephew Harry, the younger son of George and Esther, now aged 18, is sent to Korea, as one of the Gloucestershire Regiment, to do his National Service. Millicent has been only vaguely aware that there is a war going on in Korea, but has not really taken in the involvement of British troops and is horrified when she realises that Harry will be fighting not in a minor skirmish but in a war which could escalate into a Third World War. When he is taken prisoner by the North Koreans this naturally brings back painful memories of Robert’s fate. Rage bursts forth to enliven once more her diary.

  *

  30 April 1951

  Esther rang to say that Harry is alive but taken prisoner, and God knows what hellish torments he is enduring, but at least he survived this awful battle on some remote hill out there. His regiment was completely surrounded by the Chinese army north of Seoul and fought heroically. Esther, in the midst of her tears, seemed proud of this but it makes me rage, because what were they fighting so heroically for? Why were they killing and being killed? I don’t understand it though I have struggled to do so, reading The Times with close attention and becoming none the wiser. It is like the two world wars all over again, and women like me bewildered and appalled and unable, it seems, to have any influence whatsoever. Why do we allow it? Why do we let men lead us into this nightmare again and again? I feel like screaming. I think of poor Harry, only 18, that lovely boy packed off to a distant country he knows nothing of and forced to fight people with whom he has no quarrel. It is insane. I cannot, cannot bear it. All day since Esther rang I have gone around in a state of savagery, wanting to murder those in charge who are murdering the likes of Harry. My hands shake, my head thumps, I am beside myself. And when Toby came in from school, caked in mud from football, I looked at him and had a sudden vision of him in a mere four years being sent off like Harry to fight in some god-forsaken corner of this earth. It was horrible, looking at his young body, so handsome and healthy, and seeing in my mind’s eye his whole torso covered in blood and his beautiful limbs shattered. I won’t let it happen. But writing that here I know how feeble it is to say so. It happened to Alfred and Albert and to Michael, and to Robert, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. But for Toby I will find a way, I swear I will. I may not be able to stop wars but I can surely find a means to make sure he is exempt from being forced to take part in them, by means foul if not fair. I will scheme and trick, I will do anything to make sure he is spared. I had to tell him about Harry. I thought he would be terribly upset but, on the contrary, he seemed excited and wanted every detail of the battle Harry had fought in, which I could not give him. I heard him later on the telephone almost boasting about his cousin to a friend of his and I had to speak sharply to him and point out this is not a game and that Harry’s plight now is pitiful. In reply, Toby asked if he would get a medal when he came home, and I was so disgusted that I said if he comes home, which I hadn’t meant to say, it was cruel, and Toby then grew anxious and wanted to know what I meant and I had to back-pedal and say all I’d meant was that being a prisoner of war was no soft option.

  1 May

  Lay awake all night, thinking of poor Harry, trying to imagine the conditions in which he is being kept. It will be hot there, as it was in Singapore for Robert, and it will be rife with all kinds of tropical diseases. They’ll feed him on rice, I should think, rice and what else? Are the North Koreans as cruel as or even more cruel than the Japanese? Or is he a prisoner of the Chinese? I forget what Esther said. Harry is a strong young man, stronger than Robert, a lot stronger. He will lose weight but unlike Robert he will not quickly become emaciated: he has reserves of fat and muscle. But I don’t know about his mental and emotional strength, I don’t know how he will survive imprisonment. It is all so far away and, though Singapore was too, it is not the same because there’s no war on here as there was ten years ago, and so it is much more unreal. I thought we had done with war forever, or at least for this century. There we are, surviving it and all set to celebrate this very summer with our Festival of Britain, while over in a country whose location few of us could identify on a map, we are at war again, though hardly anyone seems to realise it. Yesterday, I was in such a state, I said to the postman, that my nephew had been taken prisoner in Korea. I just blurted it out as he handed me a parcel, and he said, Where’s that, then? and I couldn’t reply, just stood there stupidly staring at him, when he added, Funny to think of our lads being in a foreign war, ain’t it? Then he said he was sorry about my lad and went back to his van whistling. I know he wasn’t being heartless. He doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know Harry, he doesn’t know Korea. But in the last war, we all knew what was happening and who the enemy was and even what we were fighting for.

  6 May

  More sleepless nights. Last night I was thinking about that friend I had at school, can’t even remember her name, but the girl I longed to go to a Peace Rally with in the First World War. We were going to be pacifists. What happened to that Peace Pledge Union, and their newspaper which Robert and I read? I wonder. Maybe it’s still in existence, but if so I haven’t read about it. What has it done about Korea? Nothing, nothing that I know of.

  13 May

  News today that America has tested a hydrogen bomb. Will it be used in Korea? Surely not, but if it is being tested then this must be because it is intended for use somewhere. How wicked, how monstrous.

  15 May

  Spent most of yesterday writing a letter to The Times expressing my horror about the testing of the H-bomb by Americans or Russians, or anyone, and urging our government to have nothing to do with the manufacture or possession of this hideous instrument of war. I tried so hard not to be emotional or hysterical, but simply to be matter-of-fact and succinct, stressing that I wrote as an ordinary woman who had had to live through two world wars in which members of my family had been killed and injured and that my nephew was at this moment imprisoned in Korea. I drafted it six t
imes and wrote the final version out twice. It is nothing, writing to The Times, but it made me feel I was doing something, making the only kind of protest I seem capable of.

  20 May

  Five days, and The Times has not printed my letter. I was so sure they would, but I now see I was deluded, thinking I’d written such an important and impressive letter when on the contrary it was run-of-the-mill and from nobody. I did get a polite printed slip saying my letter had been received and was being considered for publication. But it hasn’t been thought worthy of publication and I am a fool to think it would be.

  26 May

  The newspapers are full of the defection of two diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, to Russia. It seems they can betray our secrets and cause great harm. What secrets are these? It’s strange that Russia is our enemy now, when in the war they helped save us from Hitler. All to do with communism and our fear of it. Toby asked me what communism is and I had a struggle defining it. He thought it sounded a good thing, everyone being equal and sharing everything, and of course put like that it does. He is fascinated at the moment by spies and reads everything about Burgess and Maclean.

  1 June

  Daphne is back from America. Turned up this morning, straight from Heathrow, her marriage over, or so she says. She seems not a fraction upset – on the contrary, she is in excellent spirits and delighted to be home. She says she hated America, which surprised me. I reminded her that in the few letters she’d written to me in the last five years she had boasted about how wonderful everything over there was and had had me drooling over her descriptions of food and sighing over her images of sunny Californian skies when over here everything was grey and cold and miserable. Had she been lying? No, she says, the food was wonderful and plentiful, and once they’d moved to Santa Monica from Panama City the weather was sublime. The trouble was Jimmy. He was boring. She can’t think why she liked him, except for the sex, and because he provided a way out of dismal Britain. And in civvies he wasn’t even good-looking, not the way he was in uniform in the war. So she’s ditched him and isn’t a bit ashamed. No children, luckily. Jimmy wanted children, another bone of contention between them but, though she wants them ‘some day’ not yet, and not with him. I pointed out that she hasn’t much time left (if any), considering she’s about to be forty-three, but biological facts don’t seem to worry her. She asked if she could stay with me till she gets sorted and I’ve said of course, though it will mean her sleeping in the sitting-room, not that that will worry her, though it worries me, thinking how messy she is. Connie and Toby both remembered her – shrieks from her when they came home from school and she saw how they’ve grown. When they’d gone to bed and we were sitting drinking whisky – not that I have it in the house these days, but Daphne arrived with a bottle, together with all kinds of other luxuries – she said how gorgeous Toby is, so handsome and sexy, just like his father. I said I’d never thought Charles either handsome or sexy, and she laughed and said my idea of an attractive man had always been weird. She smokes, all the time. This house is going to smell like a public bar before she goes.

  8 June

  A week of Daphne and I long for things to be back to normal. She has bought a gramophone, much to the twins’ delight, and she plays noisy records – jazz and what she calls boogie music – which make my head ache. Yesterday she asked me how I could stand doing nothing but housework and gardening in my leisure time. She asked where my friends are and my own life, and I said this was my life, the very life she found so dreary, and that I am quite happy with it. She told me if that was true, I was abnormal. It didn’t develop into an argument, but she does annoy me when she becomes so patronising. What, after all, is she doing with her life? She hasn’t achieved any of her ambitions, political or otherwise, or made good use of her superior education and now she has a failed marriage behind her and she is at a loose end. One day this week, she even said that she wished the war was still on, and I was furious. Just because she had such a good time she never thinks of all the suffering and killing that went on, never takes into consideration the wrecked lives. Oh don’t be so stuffy, she said, You enjoyed the WAAF too, and yawned.

  20 June

  Daphne is leaving us tomorrow, just in time for us still to be civil to each other. Even the twins have got over their infatuation with her, though they still relish the treats she provides. Connie wondered aloud what kind of life she and Toby would have had, if Daphne had been their aunt and guardian. It made us laugh, to imagine it. Connie wanted to know all about Daphne’s background and listened very closely while I outlined it. The fact that Daphne was orphaned as she herself was struck her forcibly and she gave me the strangest look when I said there had been no relatives and that at 16 Daphne had been left entirely alone. If Daphne hadn’t come in at that moment I think Connie might have said something significant, though I don’t know what.

  21 June

  I am now the proud but nervous possessor of a washing machine, present from the departing and ever generous Daphne. She says my kitchen makes her quite ill, it is so primitive, so devoid of all the appliances she had in California, and a washing machine is the most needed. It is entirely automatic and I am scared I will wreck it, but Daphne says I am not to be so stupid, all I need do is press buttons. She wanted to buy me what she calls a ‘proper’ refrigerator but I refused to have it – there is nothing wrong with what I have got, and I’m very lucky to have one at all. I am assuming, from all this largess, that Daphne is still well off. She looks well off, what with her fur coat and expensive clothes and shoes and her jewellery, but looks can be deceiving, though not in her case, I think. She questioned me quite sharply about my financial affairs but I refused to reveal quite how careful I have to be and swore I had no money problems. Then why don’t you buy yourself a new dress, she asked, why don’t you buy a new car? That Hillman is a museum piece. I just shrugged. She has bought a flat in Frognal, a large flat. Says she doesn’t want a house. She even says she might open a shop. That does make me laugh – Daphne, running a shop: how mundane, how unlikely. She thinks it might be a bookshop, but she hasn’t decided yet. It will never come to pass.

  5 July

  Toby and Connie have both been invited to go on holiday with friends. Connie’s friend Barbara’s family are going to the Isle of Wight for three weeks the moment school breaks up and have invited her for the first two. Toby’s chum Graham Maxwell has asked him to join him and his father on a sailing holiday off the north-west coast of Scotland. Toby is wildly excited and it is perfect for him, especially the all-male companionship. The dates are the same as Connie’s which means I will be on my own. Connie realised this and worried I might be lonely and have no one to go on holiday with, but she believed me easily enough when I said I had plans already. But I don’t. I have no plans. It will be the first time for nine years that I will be entirely free to do what I want. But what do I want? There’s the rub. I long for sun and foreign travel but lack the funds to indulge myself. I don’t want a companion, that’s for sure. I am quite content to holiday on my own if I could just decide how and where. I keep thinking I ought to spend more time with Grace and feel guilty that I don’t want to use my precious free time to do this. And I could visit George and Esther who are so sad because Harry is still a POW and would, I’m sure, appreciate company. But I’m not going to. I am going to be selfish and think only of myself for once. Maybe I could manage a week in Italy. I’ve no idea what it would cost. I will go to a travel agent and ask advice. All I want is a modest pensione sort of place and I don’t mind travelling third class by train.

  Little sparks of excitement keep jumping inside me at the mere thought of going abroad. Whatever happens I am determined not to stay here at home. It will do me good to get away and I may not have the chance again for a long time; though, on the other hand, this may be the beginning of my having a great deal of time on my own. Toby and Connie are nearly of an age to want to be off on their own, and then how my life will change aga
in. It makes me feel queer, thinking of it.

  *

  Millicent, in fact, doesn’t go on holiday that summer. She is ill, and spends most of the two weeks the twins were away – ‘mercifully’, she comments – flat on her back with a slipped disc. It is the first time, apart from the accident when she lost her baby, that she has ever been ill, except for occasional bouts of flu. Her general health throughout the diaries is excellent, with barely a mention of any aches and pains. She slips the disc, in the lumbar region at the base of her spine, moving a statue in her garden. It is only a small statue, of a lion, but it is heavy and she blames herself for being foolish enough to attempt it. She has no one to look after her, of course, and the doctor she is obliged to call is concerned about how she will manage, but she is determined to do so. Lying on her back most of each day for the first week gives her plenty of time for introspection and she doesn’t enjoy it.

  *

  26 July

  Am I to be a crock? The mere thought of not being well and active appals me, but then it would appal anyone. I can’t be an invalid, I just can’t. Is this what old age will be like? Then I don’t want to be old. Every movement is agony and the days interminable. Reading is uncomfortable because I can’t seem to get into a position where I can hold a book without having to squint at the words, and the wireless has so little on that I want to hear. Mrs Dale’s Diary is the ultimate in boredom and the programme Toby finds so hysterically funny, with those men talking rubbish in silly voices, doesn’t raise a smile.