A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  The unmarried state is more than ‘frustration at the biological level’ of sex and motherhood. It is the deep need in a woman for emotional satisfaction that tortures the unmarried woman. Marriage does not guarantee it, but one expects to find it there as one can nowhere else. I am sure that is true. It is a warmth that fills one’s whole being, makes every part of one leap into life. I wept again, bitterly, realising this – I do not weep often. But I do not want him back. I want him to go right away and stay away unless he can come to me honestly, with stable intentions and a love that is real.

  Friday, 14 November

  Ethel. Dear Ethel. She is growing so little, shrunk and old. I love her more and more, and see things so differently. But our relationship could never have been other than it was. She represents a kind of life and a class fast dying out.

  Thursday, 27 November

  Good resolutions coming up:

  The way I lie down and let friends and lovers walk all over me and sit on my diaphragm must stop. There is no need for it.

  Attend always to what I have in hand e.g. completion of ‘Peg’. If it weren’t for this I could be a lot more sociable to immediate neighbours and do a lot more in Slough. Fabian meetings, WEA etc.

  Never to lose faith that I shall in time find the Right Man and not to be worried by highbrow cant about ‘frustration’. All women, married or single, can feel a certain frustration if they are not being made love to, consistently, by the man who makes them happiest. That goes for men, vice-versa, in their sex-life.

  Not to be bothered, either, by talk of escapism. I lead a more isolated life than I need at the moment but if I don’t I shall not get this book finished, which I am convinced is essential to my progress – inner and outer (i.e. spiritual and material).

  Sunday, 7 December

  At Reading Room all day and meeting different people at night. The book is progressing famously: by sheer hard work. Gus reading more of it, is still very encouraging. I made an effort also to contact Tom again and by a miracle his friend H.C. has just arrived from Dublin to take up a good job in the BBC. H.C. is a poet, has been a sub-editor on a Dublin highbrow journal and is a reader of manuscripts – he volunteered to look at mine. He knows publishers and might be able to suggest which one I could approach.

  He is also a very charming young man, like Tom in many ways but with more character. I could fall for him easily but mustn’t. Curiously, meeting him has completely subdued the fever (the last phase of it) that clung to thoughts of A.M. But I do not want it to become a new one – i.e. the old fever for a new object. Honestly, yes, I would like to meet him again and often but not before he had read the MS, for in his being an impartial reader lies his value to me at the moment.

  Monday, 29 December

  I have done the forbidden, the unforgivable thing and read right through this journal from April 10th. Once started I could not stop. I must not, must not do this. Every time I do it I come to the same conclusion. Do not look back. These journals are no longer for me to read: only to write. And I think the time is here again when I must exercise another check. So I will finish this year here and now and resolve not to make another entry in it for at least a month.

  35.

  Guardian Aunt, Rather Exciting

  Sunday, 15 February 1948 (aged thirty-eight)

  Unfortunately, this is going to begin again with a really mean, bitchy outburst. Somewhere in Janet Whitney’s biography of Elizabeth Fry161 (excellent) she quotes Mrs Fry as saying of her journal that she uses it as an outlet for her overburdened mind, or to help induce a certain state of mind in herself. This is exactly what my journal is to me.

  My poor dear N. who has had endless trouble with her sinus and for a very long time is now in hospital. A polyp, a complicated and bad one, was removed on Friday. Quite naturally the idea of it caused her anxiety – she has been away from the office for weeks, suffering, distressed in mind and on edge. She was afraid she would have hysterics when she got in the hospital, that there might be serious complications, that it would affect her brain and even that she might die under the anaesthetic from blockage of all breathing passages. Of course all her friends have rallied round wonderfully (though she took good care that all those she wanted should know of it). I said I was going to be mean.

  It has been a tricky and very painful operation. They have pulled her poor face about and it is sadly swollen. She needs love more than ever and I never felt less like it towards her. What does one do with such base thoughts as these at a time when they may be most harmful? One cannot deny that they are there, if one is honest. Always I suspect that somewhere in these flaps of hers is a childish crying out for the dramatic, to be the centre of interest and attention. Yet however dastardly they seem, these thoughts, I don’t think they should ever be too much exposed. They are destructive – to one’s own self as well as others.

  N. and I will go on irritating each other to the end of time I am sure. Well, I suppose – and posterity mark my words if they ever reach you – that it is just these kind of irritations and bad thoughts that we have to wrestle with greatest determination and patience. The small things, the smallest you can imagine, for it is they that compose one’s shadow: the shadow within which one is perpetually at war.

  Monday, 16 February

  I have a most overwhelming desire – a real starvation hunger – to be made love to. And all the old dreams about A.M. suddenly return. Most disconcerting. If he came this evening he’d have a wholly undeserved and spontaneous success without any explanation and apology from himself. God, it is really a torment and a sickness – what a waste here of a good body, a willing woman with a spiritual consciousness and some intelligence! Does no one want her? No one want to marry poor Jean Pratt? Yet, apart from the perpetual ache for a lover who will be also a good and faithful companion, my life seems to be falling into some sort of pattern. The book progresses. I am typing it out myself, and have only the last chapters to write up properly.

  Wednesday, 18 February

  I sent a copy of my MS as far as it is typed to Tom for H.C., and last night heard from Tom on the phone. His enthusiasm and delight is simply staggering. I know how the Irish can rip the roof off with their blarney but really I think he is being sincere. It is all very very encouraging – I feel like another Fanny Burney!162 H.C. is going to read it properly in a week or two when certain important work of his own is finished. He is preparing a book of his poems for the Pilot Press. Oh dear, this all promises to be much too easy, I daren’t start hoping!

  Sunday, 7 March

  From Tom and H.C. I have not heard another word. A plague on these Irish Communists! N. has suggested I make a bold gesture and contact our old tutor, now Prof Tillotson at Birkbeck, which if successful, would make me independent of T. and his friend. H.C. is tempting my imagination and I don’t, I definitely do not, want to find myself in the same old frustrating entanglement. When we first met he seemed so anxious to see me again and sent me flattering messages through T. I might not have thought twice about him – I will not work myself into a fever over another ‘ghost’! Though what I am really asking is that someone might work themselves into a fever about me for a change and do something about it.

  Monday, 19 April

  Pooh wants now for Babs to finish her schooling in England and to get her settled somewhere this autumn and for me to play role of guardian aunt. All rather exciting. I have been writing to Princess Helena College.

  Monday, 3 May

  It is cold, bitterly absurdly cold for May. Reading Ford Madox Ford’s A Man Could Stand Up but not the war part which I can’t bear, sitting in fire-warmed kitchen, drinking lemon tea. ‘His hand was cool on her wrist. She was calm but streaming with bliss … His touch had calmed her and covered her with bliss.’ One knows this and longs for it again, but the heart is stabbed by the echo ‘why should you receive this more than any other who longs for it as much as you, a dream cradled in every lonely woman’s heart, nursed into wonderful, fooli
sh fancies?’ And I think with agony, ‘supposing all the lonely women I now know find this happiness and I do not?’ Cousin Joyce, Lydia, Luigi, N. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t bear it, and yet I should have to, should have to find fortitude, not consolation or compensation or substitute, but courage without bitterness and resentment.

  On the train to Winchester I met Gus’s long-ago boyfriend, Howard. This is the second time I have run into him within the last two years and he has recognised me and made the first advances with eager desire for further conversation. On Friday he stayed by my seat in the train for quite a while, invited me to have a drink when we could get one in the restaurant, then disappeared and did not return. In some ways I was relieved, for he was already asking questions about Gus and had revealed of himself that he was unmarried, in his father’s business and living at home. I know Gus wants to hear no more of him, yet I don’t think I should mind renewing the acquaintance for myself. He is of course much older, but seems still rather attractive, easily amusing and pleasant to be with. We once knew him so well – all of us: Gus and his despised harem …

  Nice new neighbour Mrs Semple has been helping over the schools for Babs. No hope at P.H.C. – but through an agency a host of possibles which I have to answer and acquaint Pooh with. How shall I like being a guardian aunt? Will they invest me with full responsibility, will Babs like that, will she stay with me in the holidays willingly, and shall I like that?

  Tuesday, 11 May

  Said the News Chronicle last Saturday: ‘We are living now in one of the world’s great formative periods when the patterns are being fashioned which will mould the future until the next great rebirth comes. This is both our misfortune and our opportunity: we shall only know tranquillity when we have made it for ourselves. What is needed is the confidence to forge ahead.’

  It is in essence my own situation. I am living at this moment in a formative period, my misfortune and my opportunity … what is needed is confidence.

  I am now well and truly committed to the Liberal cause, working as secretary of the Farnham Common group under our organiser, Mrs H. – drawn to it entirely by Mrs H.’s immensely attractive and likeable personality. I could not do it without the inspiration I get from her and I feel most inadequate. But I want to do it and do it well. She is clear-cut yet gentle in her approach, positive without being intolerant, quiet like deep water, sensitive, but courageous. I hope we shall be friends. I think she has suffered a great deal and is emerging like fine metal from a furnace – ‘Quakerish’ she says. It all fits. But a married woman with three children (and, I think a widow): has she time for me?

  Sunday, 30 May

  Babs is to go to ‘Oakdene’ at Beaconsfield and will arrive here sometime in September. Work at the Liberals and my liking for Mrs H. continue, but I am edging out of door-to-door canvassing. I can not do it, it tears me all to pieces emotionally. I feel raw, exposed and altogether too nervous – I hate forcing myself upon another personality which is what one has to do, and there’s more reason for this than mere timidity. Virtue somehow goes out of one, exhaustingly, and I need all I have for ‘Peg’.

  Monday, 28 June

  I wish I could capture everything, everything and imprison it here. But then it would die of its own weight, and I want this journal to live. I suppose I must always have wanted this, or I would not have tended it, treasured it so carefully. I would like it to have a place among the famous diaries of the world, following in the tradition of Marie Bashkirtseff and Barbellion.163 I may never read it right through myself now – it would suffocate me. But I would like to think of other people, years and years hence, reading it with interest, sympathy, perhaps some admiration? It is a secret whim, a secret vanity and if I thought about it too much and began to write deliberately for a future audience, visualising the audience as I wrote, then the whole thing would crumple to pieces.

  N. says to me of some poor woman wanting marriage, ‘She’s not like us who want primarily to make a name for ourselves in writing.’ Which fills me with quiet resentful rage (oh, I will not be chained and made to be exactly like N. in my aims and authorities and being!) so that I answer, ‘Oh, I don’t want to make a name for myself, I want to earn some money!’

  It is wrong that I feel so enraged and impatient and hysterical inside about this, yet I do, so often. As though she were a vulture hanging over me, waiting to swoop and devour, to swallow all that is independent and individual in me and make it part of herself. I think now, honestly, I wish she’d find the right man and marry him. I’ll relinquish willingly the silly desire – oh the silly, selfish, vain desire to be ‘first’ (to provoke her envy and astonishment, yes – and to hurt her back – for that is what her own unconscious cruelty provokes in others). Yes, I would see her married now most gladly, joyously, without a trace of jealousy or despair for myself – for it would set me free, free of that awful shadow! I’ll even go so far as to say I’ll try to manage without a husband myself. I’ll be the doomed old maid if necessary for the sake of my freedom.

  Saturday, 17 July

  Peg is so nearly but not quite finished. The last stages, preparing the top copy for publisher with lists and illustration, revising, retyping. If the book is accepted right bang off I daren’t begin to visualise the difference it will make to me. If it is turned down, I don’t know how I shall whip up energy to support the humiliation and send it elsewhere.

  The thought of that overdraft at the bank and the £100 I owe Pooh weighs heavily. If book is accepted I may have to wait nearly two years before I get any payment or see it in print – is it worth it, is it worth it? What can I do with no qualification and nearly 40, and Wee not mine. When I think of this gap, I am down in the depths, stricken with the idea of my uselessness and my loneliness, hedged in by women, always women (or will-o-wisp men like Tom), with world affairs threatening dire disaster, and uncertainty all round.

  Rain without and rain within. It has been a wretched, cold, grey July.

  Tuesday, 20 July

  Little Poil de Carotte, I sit in my corner unregarded and in silence, and secretly, Je Rage!164

  My nerves are worn to the raw edges and inside me muscles are tying themselves into tight knots with my anger, bitterness, fury. Hates of all kinds surge up and over me – hate for myself, hate for my friends. It’s the sort of neurosis I am sure that can end in cancer, sterility, insanity or suicide unless treated properly. I am exceedingly tired and growing more and more so, yet must keep at my typewriter if I am to get the MS finished. I lie at the bottom of a pit, aching all over, my tummy hard with tensions. Oh, I can see far above a blue sky and know that the world is a lovely place, there are beautiful things in it and fair people but I do not seem to belong there.

  Friday, 23 July

  It was a period. I might have known. And two hours gardening helped. I am a savage in these moods (oh who would think it, the gentle, kind and easy Jean!) and could tear the world and myself to pieces with chaos and fangs that seem to develop for the occasion. The MS is all but ready to go. I composed a letter to the publisher last night before I settled down and have since been dreaming – of some tall, well made, bronzed man at my side in dark crimson bathing trunks, who dived from me from a difficult perilous height and angle into a river and swam away magnificently. It was a joy to watch him.

  Sunday, 15 August

  ‘Peg’ was finished and posted to Macmillan’s on Sat July 24th – the day of Peggy Denny’s (late Harding) wedding reception to which I went in my New Look clothes and then to Joan’s for the weekend.165 It came back with a kind letter yesterday morning. Naturally I felt disappointed, humiliated. But as Joan says, it would be fantastically lucky to have it accepted bang off the first time, and they excuse themselves by saying they have too many commitments to be able to add this to their very limited list of new books. Most publishers are now in this position, and it is about the worst possible time in recent history to try and get a new book accepted – even established authors have great di
fficulty. But the growing fact remains that there was a very small chance that they might have liked it enough to take the risk or they would not have offered to read it, and that for some reason or another they didn’t. It has failed in some way and I wish they had given me their reasons. But the bitterness and chagrin of yesterday are fading away after a good night’s rest and an easy morning, and I think I will try next the Porcupine Press which Lizzie Cecil has mentioned to me. After that perhaps the Pilot Press where Tom knows a reader. I won’t give up.

  I have been looking through two copies of Tomorrow (King, Littlewood and King Ltd) which Clinton G.F. left me last weekend. This is the organ of the Social Creditors and is nauseatingly anti-Semitic.166 I think there is a lot to be said against the hold of financiers and bankers on world affairs – and I have heard and read a good deal on the subject in my Socialist days, but I cannot take seriously any creed that attacks another nation so violently as these people do the Jews.

  8.45 p.m.: Read Cranford. Then began a letter to N., a stilted, unworthy letter, interrupted continually by little foreign boy called John Gussler who is a child of cook employed by John Clements (film and radio star) who lives in big house nearby. Little John is neighbourhood pest, has nothing to do in school holidays, speaks English poorly, wanders in and out of other people’s gardens, is tormented by other children, eager to be friendly but is a nuisance. I feel sorry for him and let him roam in my garden – tonight he broke up firewood for me and cut the lawn and pulled up a few weeds. He did it all quite well and seemed pleased and happy. He responds to kindness and asks many questions but is difficult to get rid of. Other people turn him out sharply which I cannot do, but it is only because I don’t know how. He seems an intelligent and likeable child if one could understand what he says.

  Saturday, 21 August