A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  How do we lap up this nonsense. I wish it could all come true, but it won’t, it never does. Yet every fortune-teller has seen marriage for me; I don’t know why just now I should have such an ache for it. To deliver up one’s independence – is it worth it, just to satisfy the body’s hunger?

  Companionship? Yes, that is desirable too. Loneliness is a big thing to bear.

  Sunday, 27 February

  At the office: Mr Botterell (new boss) pleasant, very pleasant, but uninspiring. I see no interesting prospects for Publicity under our present boss. Mr Oliver has been doing propaganda posters for the works, for which there is a big demand. He wants to break away from our department and set up one of his own under the title ‘Technical Illustration and Works Posters’, and suggests that I move in too, as a copywriter. The position would give me an easier conscience – should feel that I was really doing something at last of some value towards the War Effort. It would be interesting, creative work, demanding good use of my intelligence, training and experience, and Mr O. is very optimistic. But I have seen too many good schemes at HDA turned down and trampled on. From every department one hears tales of mismanagement and lack of imagination and courage.

  Monday, 28 February

  God, I know what makes a woman drive a knife into a man! His whole attitude to me is insulting, insulting – and I wish I could make him see how much I feel this to be so. But nothing penetrates. And I, I am only feeble when we meet … do nothing, say nothing, not a sting, not a slap. Just amiable and silly.

  Wednesday, 1 March (War Diary)

  Had sun-ray treatment at Clinic up to last week when nurse went sick and am taking three halibut liver oil pills a day.

  Gunfire is terrific. My cottage shakes like a jelly and I wonder when the ceilings will collapse. I lay in bed one night watching the flares. Various relatives and friends in districts near London tell of damage and fires. Some complain of ‘nerves’ from which they have not suffered before, others say they find these short, sharp raids easier to endure than the old Blitz. Nockie, at Swiss Cottage, who is suffering from colds and sinus trouble and much the same debility that I had, says that she feels much more likely to die of illness than under a bomb.

  Sunday, 5 March

  Tommy sent me a message last week to get Horrabin’s book on Post-War Problems, now on sale in Slough. Why should he trouble to do that? And why, if he goes that far in thought for me, not go a bit further and buy me a copy (a 9d. Penguin)?

  Received full amount from Insurance for burglary, and to my astonishment 18 coupons from Board of Trade for fur coat. The fur coat I have been lucky enough to replace with a kitten musquash which my London tailor and furrier happened to have in stock. He let me have it without coupons: did not enquire too closely why, but assumed it to be secondhand, cleaned and remodelled. It is quite a success and many people say they like it better than my old one although I am not passionately fond of musquash. Cost me £60, which some folk think much too expensive, but most of the amount was covered by Insurance money and tailor has given me a replacement value certificate for £100 for Insurance. The other items I consider lost to me.

  Friday, 10 March

  Mr Botterell makes my gorge rise. He is flaky. He is a parasite. He treats me as if I were a log of wood, to be turned over and sat on when required and meanwhile left to rot. I despise him utterly. He is a maggot. He never takes me into his confidence, rarely gives me any interesting work.

  I must make an effort to talk over the position, amiably, with him. I am sure that if my old boss Stevens had had half as much evidence of my potentialities I shouldn’t have been pushed aside like this. All Mr B. does is travel the country with our Forgings film – he is away now until next Friday and has left us with nothing to do but supervise mail and cope with queries. This firm doesn’t know how to use its staff. I must approach him somehow, because then if I don’t get satisfaction I shall go to higher authorities.

  Wednesday, 15 March (War Diary)

  Last night another big raid on London. Guns here were active and I got all my Red Cross uniform ready. We are not being called but have to use our own discretion about going to the Point. Can hear our bombers going out now. A continual hum, like the dynamo of some fearful machine.

  Saturday, 25 March

  Shortly after my outburst on 10th March, the general manager, Mr H.G.H., gave me an opportunity to voice something of my discontent. Since then I have been sent to our Redditch works where employees and visitors stay at a super guesthouse known as ‘The Cedars’ at the firm’s expense. There I met with an unexpected adventure, and now wait in humiliating, sickening suspense, going as usual over and over the episode to find out where I went wrong (if I did) and what I should do if the next move is made. I feel now, fear now, that it is all over as suddenly as it happened.

  I knew he was coming to The Cedars on Thursday evening, met him at the top of the stairs and introduced myself (we knew of each other and had conversed over the phone, but had never met). I found him pleasant, easy to talk to and obviously attracted. He asked me to go out for a drink after dinner, and on our way (with the firm’s petrol) to the pub the magic began. He said he had wanted to meet me, had heard a lot about me – that I was one of the most intelligent women on the HDA staff, capable of holding down any job, and so on and so on.

  In the bar this sweet and terrible flattery continued. He asked leading questions, had all my barriers down. Here was a man (a small man, but attractive) showing a deep, personal interest in me. He could not have used a more subtle or effective weapon to disarm and win me. I couldn’t believe it was happening to me – making love to me with his eyes. It was too unexpected, too sudden, too marvellous. I wept in the cloakroom, I wept unashamedly in the car afterwards (and that must have shaken him!). And when he began to make love to me my response was electric. Indeed I had the greatest difficulty in refusing him that night but said ‘No’ emphatically when he asked if he could come to my room. Nevertheless he did come – and I really didn’t expect him. But he went when I asked him to.

  I couldn’t sleep and felt simply frightful the next morning – just drawn, white, rigid. Could make no contact at all, although he took me into Birmingham where I was catching a train back to London. I was too tired and bewildered and cold to know what to do or say. I wanted some sort of warm and definite lead from him but of course did not get it.

  I must now consider what I know and sense about him. Because it seems a familiar story – an entanglement with the old type, the philanderer, the fickle, fascinating breaker of hearts. He has a very good, responsible job at HDA, definitely an important member of the Senior Central Staff. In his late 30s but looks older. Is married and lives about two miles from this cottage. He has, I understand, something of a reputation with women and his wife is not envied.

  He has no interest in or knowledge of Art and admits it, and I doubt whether he has in any of the other arts. He is out to make money and have a good time – I suspect him of being quite appallingly vulgar and uncultured. So I probe anxiously for the darkest aspects of his character, feeling more and more dead towards him every minute. Oh, he said such unbelievably lovely things on Thursday! Yes, like ‘I love you … Do you love me? As soon as I saw you I had a feeling we were out of the same barrel … You will ask me round to the cottage, won’t you? … We’ll have rows, but we’ll have a good time too … You’re grand, I think you’re just grand!’ And the thirsty, hungry woman had indigestion all night.

  He asked vaguely, diffidently, after some hours that morning, when he should see me again. He hinted at need for discretion in Slough. I eventually told him my phone number. But he hasn’t used it yet. I shan’t do any chasing. Shall just suffer the old, old agony in solitude. I must have patience. You know nothing about him, Jean. He is just now an indistinguishable figure in a veil of silver light. Find him first.

  Sunday, 26 March

  All right. I’ll pay. What a fool, fool you are, Jean. If he had been really intereste
d in me he would have phoned by now to have found out at least how I was. I was not at all well on Friday morning, he knew that. Damn these men. Damn them. I did not tell him of my ‘past’, but did not deny that there had been other men when he tried to find out. Was it that that shocked him?

  I forgot that I was dealing with a middle-class mentality which still retains a Victorian view of sex. He thought I was a ‘nice’ girl and then discovered I wasn’t. He probably has had no contact with the modern, intellectual outlook on these matters. Sex something nice but naughty, and not indulged in by unmarried, respectable young women.

  Where do I go from here? Am I labelled now, shall I ever have a chance to put forward a different view? These men are comic. They themselves may sow what wild oats they like, may be unfaithful to their wives, may initiate virgins – but women must remain ‘unsullied’ until fate places them in their path. Yes, now I know that this attitude still really and truly exists.

  My poor little heart! Pieces chipped off and scattered through Britain, a bruised and battered heart. But it grows whole again, and I am not sure that it doesn’t improve with time, as pruning strengthens a fruit tree. It will be worth a lot to the man who can win it all and in good health.

  25.

  The Robot Plane

  Tuesday, 28 March 1944 (aged thirty-four)

  Happy, though no reason to be. Passed him today and exchanged smiles – oh very warm smiles! Was convinced he had forgotten all about me up to that moment. A philanderer, definitely. You can see it in his face. Yet the knowledge doesn’t depress me unduly.

  T. came into the office this afternoon too. I was able to meet him as I don’t remember ever meeting him before: listened and talked to him and flirted with him openly and unashamed.

  Wednesday, 29 March (War Diary)

  People are seething. Nearly everyone I have spoken to about it was disappointed in Churchill’s speech. (The one he broadcast last Sunday.)131 Many want to know why he spoke at all – they resented his cracks at his critics when no one could answer him back, and felt he was trying to win the country’s sympathy for a possible coming election. We are restless and anxious about the Second Front – some people think it will start in the Balkans, some favour Norway and few think we shall try through France. And we stick in Southern Italy, while Russia moves from strength to strength.

  Photographs are needed, for advertising purposes, of certain aircraft components. This means 1) getting the Part Numbers from the Sales dept; 2) obtaining permission from the head of Central Planning to have the parts released from their despatch batches; 3) contacting Inspection from where they will have to be collected and delivered to the Photographic Dept; 4) getting the Librarian to look them over and decide which are most suitable for our purpose. By the time all this is done the war will be over.

  Sunday, 2 April

  Double summer time.132 Quotation from the Yeats Letters:

  ‘And happiness – what is it? I say it is neither virtue nor pleasure, not this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.

  ‘It is the primal law of all nature and the universe …’

  Monday, 3 April

  Yes Jean, sit tight and wait while the long-awaited spring rain falls. It is a matter of chance as to whether the affair will develop or not. The world seems to be full of these fascinating, dangerous men for me. How it hurts – so easily tricked, so helpless, so forlorn! But just take a look at your own unstable emotions: a Czech in the summer when interest in T. had flagged, then T. again, then a faint curiosity in a Communist at the India classes, and now Mac.133

  Tuesday, 4 April (War Diary)

  Last week Manny Shinwell MP came down and spoke to our Discussion Group.134 His subject was Post War Britain, and more than 300 people came to hear him. He said that he thought world economic and political unity an excellent ideal but we must be realists. He could not see how we could achieve this perfection while such differing ideologies as that of Soviet Russia and that of individualist, capitalist USA existed together in the world. We must realise the competition that would face us from these enormous empires after the war – and possibly China and India – and that we must organise our industrial resources to the very fullest extent if we did not want to fade to a 4th or 5th rate power. It could be done if we willed it. We had the resources and the skill. All the more mature industries and the public services he thought should operate under state direction; not Civil Service direction as we know it today, but by personnel drawn from the workers and technicians in industry who thoroughly understand it. It was a stimulating speech, given impromptu without notes, and was received with tremendous enthusiasm.

  Thursday, 13 April

  I would like to know whether he is 1) smitten by sudden and unsuspected diffidence or 2) very, very busy (most probable), or 3) very, very callous.

  Sunday, 16 April

  Just back from a weekend in Hampstead with Nockie and am in one of those vile, bitter pre-period moods which all sensitive, imaginative, unbalanced women suffer. Let men note this. Difficulties loom enormous and insurmountable. One sees daylight only from the depths of an unclimbable pit.

  I want Nockie’s sympathy, approval, help and encouragement, of course I do, and I get them in large measure, and yet in the next breath she will have got her claws into a dream and will have rent it asunder. She cannot let well alone. As I lay in bed last night and when I woke this morning I felt bruised.

  She cannot bear to think that I might at any time find a greater happiness than she has done. Or that I should do any work which she herself could not do too and excel in.

  When she comes to analyzing my doings she draws from her own experience – and the yardstick of her own ego is brought out. She wants me to be happy, to have a happy love affair or marriage. But to her own standards. She will never wholly approve of any man I fall for. Because I have fallen now for a business type, she suggests ‘a tall American who’d call you “honey”’. Because she is in love with an American, I must fall in love with an American too. Because she is not really happy in her job and despises the people (civil servants) she works with, she thinks that I must not like my job and companions either. If I followed her pattern, if I were like her, she knows she could beat me and be ‘top’.

  Wednesday, 3 May (War Diary)

  The long evenings are here again. Weather brilliant, blossom everywhere profuse, spring in all its perfection. Last night about 11.15 a plane dived with a terrific roar over the trees and houses here. I saw a brilliant burst of flame as it crashed and exploded out of sight. The sky in the west glowed for a long time and one could hear crackling and sharp reports. Was told this evening that it was a Mosquito, landed on a common about three miles away, set fire to hay ricks but did no other damage. The crew of two was killed.

  ‘Salute the Soldier Week’ in Slough this week. Our firm aims at £15,000.

  Five new kittens.

  Thursday, 4 May

  This evening as I rushed over to the main office for some information Mr Botterell had failed to send to our advertising agents who were needing it urgently, I turned and saw Mac in the corridor behind me. I waited for him and heard him say, ‘Hello stranger! I nearly cycled up to see you one night last week. But I was too scared.’

  And myself answering, ‘Go on! …’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was. Plumb scared! It was Wednesday or Thursday … were you alone?’

  ‘I had a visitor all last week (Josephine), but I’d be very pleased to see you anytime … Next time, don’t be scared.’ (Vilely inadequate.)

  Heart bounced up and hit the roof, so that Mr B. found me singing at the top of my voice, ‘I’m singing in the rain …’ when I thought everyone had gone. I went duty bound, to see the film of Mme Curie, but took little of it in, and certainly did not weep as everyone else seems to have done.

  Sunday, 7 May

  In the interests of this record, although I am damn tired, I must note that I really do seem to have developed, an
d am becoming the person I always felt I should be. And now that I have written that, I want to retreat and have gone all bashful.

  Barbara Linnett brought two young Americans over this afternoon, and one of them, a lively, sensitive young animal, appeared vastly intrigued by me. Until quite recently – until I went to High Duty Alloys I think – the only men who ever showed any interest in me were poor, inhibited creatures like myself, but now the much more normal and anything-but-inhibited variety are taking notice. It is immensely gratifying. HDA has done me a lot of good.

  Thursday, 25 May

  He has a daughter. Sally-Ann.

  Wednesday, 31 May

  The torment does not automatically cease. He said, ‘I still intend to come one evening to have coffee or whatever it is you give people.’ That was all. He was on his way to collect his daughter and was very late. Imagination still easily panders to flooding desire. And then I heard a dance track on the wireless which took me back to 1936–37 when I was with Gwen Silvester at the Empress Rooms. I was then a victim of passion for Charles Scrimshaw. The dreams, the hope, the palpitations and desire. Don’t think I even exchanged two words with him.

  Tuesday, 6 June (War Diary)

  INVASION DAY. It really is rather thrilling to hear that the long awaited action of our armies is at last taking place.135 The BBC announcement was being relayed over the work broadcast at noon today. We crept to our places in the canteen in a cathedral-like hush. ‘There’ll be many worried homes today,’ said L.S. Work went on as usual in the afternoon with a sort of subdued excitement prevailing. Several people suggested that we have been waiting, not for any particular day, but for the fall of Rome. Many claim that they had ‘feelings’ last night of pending events.

  Went to see Lizzie and Peter on Sunday and their son and heir, born on Easter Saturday. Lizzie is trying to cope with baby and belongings in two rooms in someone else’s house – sharing kitchen and bathroom. Peter when he comes home at night washes the nappies. I have never heard of a father doing this before but Lizzie mentioned several others who do the same now. What a war will do to the middle classes.