A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  20.

  The Whole World Involved

  Tuesday, 23 September 1941 (aged thirty-one)

  I have worried myself into a fever over the prospect of this job. My temperature last night was 100.6 – am sure due to over-anxiety. So terrified that I shall do something foolish and irrevocable when I begin.

  Glancing through this week’s Radio Times I see the names of commodities that are now part of the fabric of the nation, such familiar names but they may not be used in articles, stories, novels, plays and broadcasts – in any of the things that make familiar things more familiar to us. But they have their influence and place. In my life, for instance, Gibbs Dentifrice: a pink block in a silvery tin that I used when very young until something about it enraged me, and I smashed the tin and have never used it since. Odol, toothpaste and gargle which I bought with enthusiasm when they first appeared because of their bright light blue and white packs. Kruschen Health Salts in a dark brown glass jar from which I began to take in my early teens believing with ardour that they would solve all my problems. Malteser chocolates – delectable sweets, introduced to me by June at Hampstead but now seldom to be seen except at the Canteen when I hand them over the counter to the Tommies. Peak Frean biscuits, Sifta salt, Pepsodent toothpaste, which I was warned by a cousin-in-law dentist against using as it scratched the enamel, but did use. Senior’s fish and meat pastes. Carter’s Little Liver Pills – the name spread on huge hoardings facing railway tracks that run through open country. Caley’s chocolates, Grey’s cigarettes.

  What a pity that there are so many odd men about, their oddities just a bit too much of a barrier to make one want to marry them. There’s the psychologist Jennings White, who lives in South Hill Park. He is searching for a housekeeper/secretary he can marry. Joan sees him often and finds his loud, hysterical laughter most embarrassing. And David Mitchell, the poet, plump, middle-aged, nervous, easily offended. And Jill’s tall, neurotic bachelor friend Clifford, a typically mother-swathed egotist. Is there no healthy, attractive, unattached male for me now in the world? Even my one neurotic seems to have deserted me.

  Thursday, 25 September

  Nockie has been warning me not to underestimate my ability, not to allow myself to be exploited by a Tory editor, to stick out for my own work, not to sign away my liberty, to insist on a rise at the end of 6 months. I am starting at £3 10s. a week, but if it had not been for Nockie I would have meekly asked for £3 and accepted £2. 10 without a murmur.

  Wednesday, 1 October

  Yesterday my last full free day in London. Ordered a coat and skirt at Peter Jones for 13 guineas. An appalling price and has taken most of my coupons, but I look on it as an investment. I can manage now with the clothes I have for at least a year (undies will need renewing). Stockings will be the only problem. At present I have six pairs and shall be able to wear one pair a day through the week, rinsing every worn pair as I take them off at night.

  A letter this morning from Cousin Martin. He says that the Russians have obviously been concentrating on armament production for a long time, that they are supremely confident of victory, have not even yet fully mobilised the army and that the British have been well and very efficiently received.

  Army manoeuvres here all this week, at least in the Slough and Aldershot areas, against a mock invasion. On Monday fierce air fights were going on overhead.

  This time tomorrow! I’m scared.

  Thursday, 2 October

  An incredibly casual office. It does not matter if I do not get there until 10 a.m. Everyone clears off at 4.30 p.m. We do not work on Saturdays. Tea at 11 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. No one pays any attention to the contract one has to sign. Most of the work seems to be done by Mr Musgrave and his secretary Miss Stuart, aided by typist Peggy. So far I have read papers for ‘news’ and have been handed a series of articles on roof construction to sub. I am not threatened at the moment with overwork. The strain of going backwards and forwards will not be nearly as great as I feared it would. I catch the 8.20 Green Line bus in the morning which takes me to Hyde Park Corner by about 9.30, and a bus home from there about 5 p.m. so that I am back here about 6.30 p.m.

  Fetter Lane – there is hardly anything left of it.

  Sunday, 5 October

  Still not a word from the incalculable F. Joan, Nockie and Ethel have each phoned to find out how I liked the new job. If he were really interested in me you would think he would have made some effort too.

  He thinks he knows all there is to know of the art of making love. He does not know even how to begin. It does not begin in his room with port wine and a verse or two of Keats.

  Monday, 6 October

  Met Joan for lunch. She brought a casual and most offhand message from F. and was boiling with rage at him. I came home in the bus planning a letter I would write, saying a few straight things cruelly. But was too tired to start it when I came in. And then he phoned! Most incomprehensible of men. And I, most foolish of women, am happy.

  The exchange of prisoners between us and Germany seems to me fantastic. In the middle of the bloodiest, the most hot-headed of wars, the two governments pause, bow to each other at a polite distance above the heat of battle, command a truce over an area of the Channel so that the wounded, the women and children of each can return to their own countries. If they can do that why can’t they agree to stop the war altogether?

  [Note added later:] These ships did not sail. All arrangements were cancelled and the prisoners sent back to their camps on October 8th. That monster Hitler.

  Thursday, 9 October

  I am full of hate tonight: for the deadly, humourless, efficient, destructive Prussian; for the men in power who, I am certain, put every obstacle in the way of our aid to Russia; for the feeble little Britishers who on their homeward journeys from the office tonight are saying, ‘I suppose it was to be expected.’ The public think we can ‘take it’ because we withstood last year’s raids. Does it imagine that the German High Command has not since been preparing in elaborate detail plans for our total destruction? God, is the age of miracles over? Can you not send a plague or earthquake to demolish the German High Command and all its works?

  My position at the office is delicate. There is very little work at the moment. I must make work for myself, make suggestions and be prepared to carry them out. I feel like the new girl at school again.

  Friday, 24 October

  The position at the office improves.

  F. only gets in touch with me when he wants to sleep with me, which makes me feel like a concubine.

  Sunday, 26 October

  London has had a long lull from bombing, but people still sleeping in the tubes, probably because they save money thereby, but what a way of living. As the war drags on a Tube Dwelling community will develop. A thousand years’ hence excavations will be made and the site of some bombed and long-forgotten stations discovered, disclosing skeletons and relics of Tube Dwellers.

  Friday, 14 November

  A jagged jolt. Soon I shall have lost the job. I am not up to expectations, says Mr Wood. There is no work for me to do, I have failed to create any, and I must therefore look round for something else elsewhere. He hoped I would develop a news-sense, which I show no signs of doing. There has been nothing for me to do but read the newspapers, but there has been no building news; he wanted me to make bricks out of straw. I’m a failure, a bloody failure. Beware a casual office! The notice is three weeks.

  Sunday, 23 November

  So I have been seeing people. Mrs Clarke of the Fabian Society has offered me a temporary job cataloguing the Blue Books.115 But I’m off the track again, lost in a fog.

  Saturday, 29 November

  It is a vile age. An age that has bred generations and generations of frustrated, disillusioned, cynical men and women for whom there is now no future but death or a change of heart (and who can work that latter miracle for us?) We were born sensitive, imaginative and energetic, but the fight in the world was a competitive, brutal one for
material advantages which we in our hearts despised. Pressure from this heaving, confused world moulded us into dreamy, idle and shy adolescents. We have become miserable, haunted, dying people. We have become frigid, dull or aggressive – we shrivel, rot or explode. We are the ghostly train of the Also-Rans.

  Sunday, 30 November

  Gollancz yesterday, speaking to the Fabians.116 An emotional, sensitive Jew, with tremendous domed, intellectual head. He does not believe the entire German race are to blame for this war, and explained the growth of Hitlerism very ably. Insists that we must win this war, but that we must also help the German people to break the power of the Prussian militarists, the Junkers and the industrialists. This can only be done by accepting and helping to establish International Socialism, and this implies – though he did not say so – breaking the power of our own militarists, landowners and industrialists. We must regain a passionate faith.

  Monday, 1 December

  The milk ration has knocked us sideways, reduced to 2 pints per adult a week.

  There is to be a debate in parliament on making conscription of women to the Services and industry compulsory.

  Tuesday, 9 December

  A light fall of snow and Japan’s declaration of war surprised us on Sunday night. Now the Pacific is in the news and America is in the war. The whole world involved.

  The whole world at war. It is almost too gigantic a thought for human intelligence. The German campaign in Russia has come to a halt. (Those marvellous Russians!) But German power is not broken. During the winter one supposes they will now turn their attention to us and the Atlantic again. We hear that the North East coast was badly raided last night.

  Thursday, 2 January 1942

  New Year. There seems no hope of suitable employment for me anywhere. ‘The department is advised that your qualifications and experience do not fall within the range …’ ‘Your application has been receiving our consideration but …’ ‘We regret that there are no vacancies on our staff …’ A little batch of these sort of letters has greeted me every night this week on my return from the Fabian Society. My date for Registering with the ATS looms nearer and nearer (Jan 24th).117

  For the sort of jobs I am after I lack, at the age of 33, experience. Oh God, those wasted years! If this is ever read by posterity, let posterity ponder on this: You cannot run away from life. If you try, life will only catch you in the end, and the longer you’ve been running the more it will hurt. Learn to be hurt as early as possible, welcome being hurt; face pain, humiliation and defeat in your teens; accept them, let them go through you, so that you cease to be afraid of them.

  Saturday, 4 January

  What a tin of plums will do! One in my store had been oozing and I went to consult the Campbells as to the wisdom of eating contents or not. The conversation veered to jobs and Mr C. advised me strongly to explore the possibilities of the Slough Trading Estate. Not that there will be anything in my narrow line, but there are advantages attached to a job in Slough that I can not ignore. Mr Campbell suggested welfare work.

  Thursday, 8 January

  I wrote to Nockie at New Year, and her reply I must quote – it is such sane and sensible wisdom which I know in my heart to be true. ‘Lot of nonsense about your wasted years. No such thing if carefully analysed. We can’t all be ready to make a spring off the board on leaving college. Think of all the advantages of the spirit you have had in the past years.’

  Saturday, 10 January

  I want that job. I reach bursting point about it. Nockie has sent me a packet of information about alloys.

  F. has just phoned. I wish, I wish he weren’t quite so much F. It isn’t fair that I should still be disturbed by him physically. (Nockie calls it lechery, bless her – she says it can’t be physical attraction because he is such a poor physical specimen.)

  We have been, and are, promised to be the best-fed nation in Europe. My relations are saying that they can remember in the last war feeling hungry but have not done so yet in this. They have high praise for Lord Woolton the Food Minister. If I had no stores in I could still feed myself adequately. A regular supply of butter, marg, cooking fat, cheese, bacon, sugar and tea arrives each week. As much bread and flour as I need. Custard powder and starchy things like rice, tapioca and so on can be had at intervals liberally without ‘points’. The milk ration is helped out by tinned and powdered varieties. There are still plenty of tinned beans, carrots and soups. Eggs are very scarce. Meat is more difficult than it was, but there is often sausage meat and corned beef as substitutes and makeweights. Fresh and salt fish can be bought at controlled prices in fairly good supply. Cakes and pastries are still obtainable by order or by queuing from most reliable confectioners. Sweets I hardly ever see. The biscuit supply varies. But now, the papers warn us, Japan’s attack on American merchant conditions will make a difference and we must expect to ‘tighten our belts’ and may yet get poorer menus.

  Clothes restrictions are more severe than they have ever been. I need a new warm dressing gown badly, should much like a winter swagger coat. The dressing gown I may get by buying furnishing velvet and thin felt and getting one made.

  I cannot grumble about clothes. I have heard recently of an old well-known Wembley couple (the Dudley Wrights, who had a very large house and corresponding reputation in the old Wembley days) who were torpedoed on their way home from Canada and are now interned by the Germans somewhere unknown. He lost his teeth and she her glasses. They have so few clothes that she has knitted herself shoes from the string saved from parcels. The terrible tales that will be told after this war are beyond one’s imagination.

  Have discovered a small zoo shop in Slough that will take kittens, so perhaps can get rid of the next lot more easily, and am relieved at the thought. I had visions of the cottage developing into an enormous cattery – generations and generations of Dinah’s family swarming in and out of the windows and disturbing the neighbours, until I was driven to live in the shed.

  Thursday, 15 January

  I have been accepted as a Technical Journalist in the Publicity Department of High Duty Alloys. I feel oddly confident.

  21.

  What Being a Woman Means

  Tuesday, 20 January 1942 (aged thirty-two)

  I want to know everything about the future, all at once.

  Yesterday was worn to a shred with the nervous strain of ‘being new’ again and bearing the abiding horror of being turned out. The situation has similar points to the one at the Architect and Building News. ‘Nothing very much for you to do at present Miss Pratt – I hope you won’t find it too boring.’ Agony.

  I work with an attractive young Irish publicity engineer called Hughes and a good natured youth called Buckland, our ‘commercial artist’, rather pink and white, who poses a lot but is probably quite good at his job when he has anything to do. There are two other men, Goldsworthy and Lessel, whom I haven’t met yet, and a swarm of typists in a room of their own. The firm’s doctor (I had to be medically examined) spluttered and stuttered that he couldn’t understand why they kept on so many young people doing nothing. ‘Now they are taking you on. If you were to replace one of the young men I could understand it.’

  We do not have to be punctual in the morning but I don’t know how late I dare to be yet. One foot of snow outside my cottage door delayed me half an hour today. We were all allowed home early tonight because of the weather. I am learning an awful lot about metals and alloys.

  Saturday, 24 January

  Think I am falling heavily for the young Irishman (Hughes). He might be anything between 25 and 28.

  Tuesday, 27 January

  My imagination was busy with Mr Hughes all over the weekend.

  Stevens (my boss) came in to see me today. He wants me to get a picture clear in my mind of what the aluminium industry has done in the past and hopes to do in the future.

  Wednesday, 28 January

  Hughes and Buckland have disappeared. No one at the office has seen or heard of them
for three full days. Poor Mr Stevens, he really has no control over them. I have a sad feeling I shall not see Hughes again. He was a bad young man, but there was about him that fatal Irish charm, and he could talk with sympathy and eloquence on many subjects that move and delight me. There seemed to be a promise there of our being able to build a rare and exciting friendship. It is as though I held a book in my hands that I very much wanted to read, and some twist of fortune has taken it from me before I had even finished the preface.

  Thursday, 29 January

  Such a simple explanation – flu! The point that made us suspicious was that both Hughes and Buckland were absent together and sent no explanation. Now forget Mr Hughes. There is a girlfriend, anyway, in the laboratory.

  On my way to the canteen today, which lies back from the street-front buildings among the sheds and untidy offices that straggle for miles across the estate, I peeped into one of the workshops. Passions of white flames from furnaces lit the whole interior. Enormous parts were being heated and hammered. Brawny men moved about naked to the waist or with shirt sleeves rolled. The sound of hissing flame and hammers on metal, the pale lights in the high roof, the shadows and the steam. Artists should paint it, poets should pen it, musicians translate it. Modern industry, all turned now to making guns. ‘Thirty thousand a year!’ said Lord Beaverbrook last night. Thirty thousand guns! Forty thousand guns … fifty thousand …

  Monday, 16 February (War Diary)

  School magazine arrived last week. Old Girls are ATS and WRENS and WAAFS, VADs and other volunteers in alarming array. Others are in the Land Army, the War Office, the Air Ministry, helping in welfare centres for evacuees – all kinds of Government work. One is Official Indexer, whatever that may be, another a District Inspector for the Ministry of Health, another is interested in the International Women’s Organisations and their plans for reconstruction. And one girl whom I knew quite well (although in Selfridges not long ago we decided not to recognise each other) has been working a longboat on the Worcester Cut with another woman, carrying freight, and is now to train women to do the same kind of work for the Grand Union Canal Co. Many are scattered about the Empire.