A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  Friday, 6 January 1950

  I must stop using this journal as an escape, if I can. I need now, more than ever, practise in communication, i.e. direct, by means of conversation, with my opponent present and waiting for my answer. It is all very well after some failure in social intercourse to fly to these pages and say, ‘But that wasn’t what I meant … really, if only I had had the chance, what I meant to say was …’ This may prove to oneself that one has it ‘in the bag.’ But it is not enough. I must learn to ‘get it out.’ (Why? One feels one is dying if one doesn’t, that’s why.)

  I have re-read from May 7th 1949. I must not look back. One turns at once into a pillar of salt. I still have ‘Peg’ to finish, the Agent and publisher to meet. When the general election comes I must put all I have got into the fight for the Liberals. I will close this book now with this last resolution, that unless anything stupendous occurs, I will not touch it again until June. Keep to these resolutions, Jean.

  Saturday, 7 January

  10.30 p.m. I falter once more before I draw the final line. I am sure I am right in this discussion (to close the book). This journal has been a help, a consolation, a refuge and a pleasure, but something vital drains away through it. Latterly I have always left it feeling exhausted, ‘virtue’ of some sort has gone out of me, and is being wasted, because of the need to write here. The original purpose and use has ceased, or changed. When I was in a tangle, unhappy, and without guidance – it served. But now, no. I must move in another direction, divert all the energy usually spilled here into more creative channels. I must open doors and windows, and walk into the healthier spaces of more open life.

  ‘My brother and sister in law were kindness itself.’ A visit from Pooh and Ivy.

  38.

  X-Ray Man

  Wednesday, 14 June 1950 (aged forty)

  I have kept my resolution: silence here a full six months. I ‘cheated’ I think only twice by making entries in the MO Diary which will not be sent to them. But that diary I have kept only fitfully – my heart is not in it and I begin to feel a little annoyed with MO and disinclined to make the effort. It arises from a reference to the Liberals in their pamphlet summing up the Election. It indicated that they themselves have no great opinion of the Liberals – it was chilling, discouraging. Why should I ‘open up’ to a set of strangers who can, evidently, have no real sympathy for my particular attitude? Perhaps that is cowardly, but it dampens spontaneity to feel that what one is writing may be sneered at by the audience for which it is particularly written. It is better to have no particular reader in mind. A real diary will always find its readers.

  A review of P.A. Spalding’s Self Harvest in this month’s National Book League Journal, by Georgina Mase, has pulled me back to this journal as much as anything, though I would have started again this month if I had not seen it.179 ‘A true diary,’ she says, ‘is one in which the diarist, with an irresistible urge to preserve experience, has recorded for the sake of recording … It really is a record of immediate experience and not a mere description or picture of the past “touched up” by memory. Maurice Chapelan … sums up the difference between diarists and writers of memoirs or autobiography by saying that the former seek to know themselves while the latter seek to make themselves known.’

  By these standards I am a confirmed diarist and accept it joyously. Self-analysis may be ‘carried to such lengths that self-consciousness obscures vision’ – obscures vision, impedes action in living, can become such a shelter that one never progresses as a person. That is the danger for the diarist as an individual in the body politic. But I see no reason to restrain the urge if it is as insistent as it is in me. I am a diary writer, an addict, and shall continue if only spasmodically, although ‘of all strange and unaccountable things this journalising is the strangest,’ and although of all the great diarists mentioned by Georgina Mase I have read only Barbellion at all thoroughly, and have no settled notion as to whether mine will ever rank with these to be preserved.180

  Let me collect the threads now since January. The bulk of the ‘Peg’ revision was finished and handed over to the publishers before the hard work for the election began. Then came a full fortnight for the Liberals.181 I am still Sec to our reconstituted Assoc, but wish I weren’t. I don’t know enough and haven’t the time to study the subject as I feel I should to be an adequate worker for this cause, though I still believe in it. We have a jumble sale ahead of us, on Sat week, and most of the organising for this falls on my shoulders, or rather finding people who will do the different jobs necessary.

  Since the election I have been finishing ‘Peg’ and collecting the illustrations and have met the publishers. I took in almost the last batch yesterday and apart from about six more letters it is really done until the galley proofs begin to arrive. H. & B. are a very old firm and published Fitzgerald Molloy’s Peg Woffington in the nineteenth century – hence their interest. The first notice is in their spring catalogue. The manager, M.H., is a pleasant intellectual type (one could visualise him on the N. Statesman staff) with white hair, a young face, and blue eyes. I haven’t met dragon Curtis Brown yet or even corresponded lately, but should like some of the advance money now if possible and will have to tackle him about it.182

  Leslie and Ivy left in April for Barbados. I am once more Guardian Aunt. Babs has improved tremendously. She is to spend the summer holidays with her school friend at Bourne End, and I have been advertising for PGs again but have not been very successful to date. Only one definite booking so far – an elderly couple from Northumberland who come here on Friday for a fortnight. I dearly need (financially) to be booked up for August and September but have nothing so far.

  I am afraid N. and I have reached another impasse. She is calling me a ‘funny little thing’ again – always a sign that she is baffled and irritated with me. Last March she was operated on for a fibroid.

  Cats. Dinah has had her usual spring brood. The adored, persistent old monster tabby father was run over at last this weekend, so I am told. Dear darling pussies. Dinah with her family in the armchair, Squib asleep on the sofa at my feet. Full of fleas, all of them.

  Wednesday, 21 June

  Saw Vicary about the clock which still won’t go. He had promised to come up yesterday evening. ‘The day you come when you say you will, Mr Vicary,’ I told him, ‘I shall have to be carried to hospital.’ He vowed he would come tonight. Really when he makes these promises I do believe he means to keep them. Soon after 1 p.m. I have scrappy lunch and a pot of tea and top and tail gooseberries listening to Woman’s Hour.

  [Later:] No Vicary, of course. Since 1940 he has had the works of my grandfather clock to clean. The case I put into store some time after the war. People tell me he has probably sold the clock part – he has been known to do such things. I keep asking for it. Except for the grandfather clock I have had everything back that I have taken to him and many small items of jewellery for other people. A little man and a born Bohemian. Works until 4 a.m. I am told, and is never available until after 11 a.m.

  I sympathise. To each the life that suits him. I do feel vile for the first two hours in the morning. All minor irritations and deeper hates seem to come to the surface in concentrated attack. This morning I spilt cornflakes, upset mint sauce, and splashed tea over the table. I would like to have taken a jam jar or two into the garden and smashed them with a hammer.

  Sunday, 25 June

  The Jumble is over and we have made a clear £20 profit. I am shattered by a cat war in progress. Most of this evening I have been trying to catch a heartrendingly mange-ridden Tom, but he is of course much too spry. He really is in a terrible condition and his owners should be shot with him.

  Monday, 10 July

  We’ve been having a storming July, but yesterday was perfect: could not have been better for Babs’s party. They entertained themselves with games of their own so aunt had only the cats to worry about and this was quite painless. But what should happen in the morning but Tom must phone
and ask if he could come with a friend. Their entrance at 5 p.m., after the girls had had their tea, was the most effective that has happened to me in while. Me still busy in the kitchen, girls all on lawn outside, comes Tom ‘Jeanie, Jeanie!’ I run to sitting room, he to back door, this happens several times to delight our audience. He and friend Mac looking like a couple of strays, but the young are intrigued with anything male, and being Irish was a further asset. We went for a drink or two in Beaconsfield and got soaked in thunder storm at 10.30 – so much so that it did not take much to persuade them to spend the night at Wee.

  The Irish are enraging and fascinating and never dull – I am steeped in it all again. Tom’s latest affair – the femme fatale daughter of John Gilbert who sounds a bit of a nymphomaniac to me, flitting from one besotted Irishman to another – has been carrying on with Tom and Mac so that until a week ago they were ready to shoot each other on sight. But now she has left them both for another and they are weeping on each other’s shoulders.

  Tuesday, 18 July

  Tom has been much in my thoughts, inevitably. He hinted, half seriously, that he was looking for a wife and that naturally set my undisciplined imagination flying. But if it came to the point actually, even if he got as far as asking one, I believe he would be off like an arrow from a bow if one did take him seriously and showed any real desire for marriage with him.

  Friday, 21 July

  I had ideas of going to see Mr Ichabod and Mr Toad this afternoon but did not feel equal to it. I must therefore be a little ill as I adore Walt Disney. But I do not much now like going to films on my own: it is so depressing coming out and home alone. I called on D. yesterday morning to see if she would go with me. Windows were open but there was no immediate response to my ring. Then she popped her head from an upstairs window and was I think in a dressing gown, and said she was busy packing. No other explanation as gardener was in drive, but it all seemed rather odd and curiosity-making.

  Friday, 28 July

  The doctor thinks I may have incipient jaundice. I have been given pills and medicines and ordered off all fats and to rest as much as possible. When I turn yellow I have to stay in bed.

  The phone went. A Liberal call. The phone again. The same Liberal. I long for the luxury of a phone by my bed. It is something I have never had and I can’t think of anything similar that would give me more pleasure – to lie here now, for instance and receive a call from Tom, or to gossip with Lydia. Dear God, what I wouldn’t do for Wee if it could be mine within the next year or so! Let me indulge my daydream for once and spend, say, up to £1,000 on it. Completely redecorate, inside out. Have new flooring all over top storey. A new stair carpet. New settee and armchair covers. Line the new curtains. Have a larder built. Bookshelves. If funds would allow, I would have a sun porch built onto sitting room, a bay built out from the French windows about 3ft. I would do such a lot to the garden too, move the herb bed and have the lawn whole. Yes, and proper coal and coke bunkers built, along the back wall perhaps where the sun never reaches – except that that was where I once thought of having a bathroom. As someone said, it would be cheaper to build a new cottage.

  Sunday, 6 August

  As Peggy Denny said, their new home is a ‘lovely little semi-detached … a come down’. But they are all adapting themselves gallantly and the rooms are furnished with simple good pieces of furniture to meet their needs. Life is not less full or interesting for Peggy because material means are reduced. They live very near a large sports club to which they all belong, her husband is secretary to the Royal Academy social club and there is so much work and many contacts in that. She is taking violin lessons. Life does not have to be constricted because you live in the suburbs; what you have made of your own goes with you. Peggy with her interesting, lively young family will never be dull or narrow. My complaint against the suburbs has always been their stifling narrowness of outlook, but if there were for instance several Denny families living in Wembley I would not at all mind having to go back to Homefield. But the country does pull. If one could only establish a colony. I only mean that I wish I could have all the people I like most living around me.

  Saturday, 12 August

  I knew it was rash to boast that I was ‘never ill’.

  Stomach pains. I had a temperature of over 102. Lady Spicer came round to borrow a lemon and insisted that I spend the night in her house, which I did very thankfully – after all it might have been appendicitis. Rest and warmth brought the temp down rapidly and by this morning was normal so I returned to my own bed and awaited Dr W. It is all a mystery. He says I am anaemic, probably underweight and is arranging for me to have chest X-rayed – but can’t find the exact cause.

  Well of course, part of me is loving all this. I am the centre of attention and neighbours being so kind. Mrs Semple sent me some lunch and got medicine for me. Lady Spicer comes to enquire and natters about the smoking. And I lie in bed or on the sitting room sofa delighted to think I have a real excuse to do nothing and perhaps put off all the things (like committee meetings) that I don’t really want to do. In fact I feel a frightful hypocrite. The pains are never more than uncomfortable and I am always able to stop whatever I’m doing when they begin.

  Monday, 14 August

  To have my chest X-rayed. What am I in for? Months in a sanatorium? The thought drives me frantic. To look pale and interesting and be showered with sympathy and kindness is all lovely and diverting, but not at that price. Dear God, now I do go down into darkness, alone, but I will put my hand into thy hand.

  Tuesday, 16 August

  Really, I was in a panic last night. My main distress was for the cats. If I proved infected then they would all have to be put to sleep, probably within the next few days. But the X-ray this morning revealed nothing.

  I must say that what I have experienced of National Health Service so far is really not as bad as has been made out.183 All the doctors or specialists (I had to have my eyes tested in the spring when it was discovered that there is a cataract in my right eye) that I have seen have all taken trouble and spent as much time on me as any previously paid privately. Sometimes there is long waiting at the clinics but I have been lucky, and learned to go a bit before the stated time so as to be at the head of whatever queue there may be.

  This morning I was sent to the chest clinic at Upton Hospital in Slough. It was all rather shabby, obviously in need of new paint and room for stores, but all the people I had to deal with were pleasant and ready to be helpful. I did not have to wait long, was interviewed by a nurse whose face was very familiar and learnt that she came from Farnham Common – I have seen her about for years and am not at all sure I didn’t know her in the Red Cross. She took particulars and weighed me. After another short wait in its X-ray dept I was shown into a cubicle and told to strip to the waist. A wizened, sad-faced little man in a dingy white coat (there were many dingy white coats about) was busy with a young woman already naked to the waist and unashamed. I waited with cardigan round my shoulders until he was ready and then stepped forth. The door was wide open, officials coming in and out but no one took the least notice of half-naked young women being pressed and patted by sad-faced little man. He pushed me up against a flat metal plate, so cold it made me jump, brought my chin up, my shoulders down, held my ribs in as I breathed in and out and then went away, telling me to breathe in and out again and to hold it, clicked something, and I was able to dress again. The next patient was a man. I think they kept him back until I came out fully clothed but everything was so casual I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just a coincidence. Poor little X-ray man – no wonder he looks sad, patting and photographing women’s bare bodies all day long, he must be bored to death with the female torso.

  Another short wait and the negative was given to me and I went to wait for the doctor. This was the longer wait but possibly not more than 20 minutes. I was shown into another shabby little compartment equipped for the doctor. He was young and nice, asked no end of questions, told me there was
nothing whatever wrong with my lungs from that negative, and looked at old negatives taken in 1943 (a real cough scare then) which I had been told to bring. He seemed puzzled but took a lot of interest, had me stripped again and breathing for his stethoscope, and looking down my throat and thumping me here and there.

  Of course the book had to come out in all this (my work). Was I a nervy person, was I worrying about the book? It seemed that must be the answer. My weight is now 8st 12lbs which really is a shock – it used to be on an average 9st 7lbs. I must then be getting thinner as everyone says though I have not noticed any big difference in the fit of clothes worn (and still wearing) over the last 10 years.

  Friday, 18 August

  Dr W. thinks anaemia is the seat of the trouble and I am to go on taking iron. And I prescribe for myself more fresh air, less browsing in libraries. Anaemia – yes. It seems to fit, to explain my months-long feeling of fatigue. Now I can be lazy, delicious thought, with a clear conscience.

  Friday, 8 September

  Of all my paying guests, Miss C. stands out as with the most character. She arrived a week ago in lavender and several inches of pink satin petticoat showing beneath her grey skirt. A plump, delicately rosy grey curled person with pale blue eyes and a difficult new top plate. ‘Don’t think I didn’t like your nice food dear, I just can’t eat …’ But with a little manipulation of a nail file she made it tolerable and recovered her appetite. ‘We did enjoy that, dear! We just ate and ate – as I was saying to my friend, till my corsets cracked!’ On the first morning she wandered round to the kitchen in black satin flowered dressing gown looking for the lavatory. ‘I’ve missed the door, dear.’ She was frequently missing doors.

  And never stopped talking for the first few days. Her conversation was sprinkled with people she knew or had met. Augustus John, Sonnie Hale … She was a delight. So vague, so silly, so obviously enjoying everything, and a personality in her own sphere, interested to the verge of inquisitiveness in all about her. She embraced me affectionately at parting.