Her friend Mrs G. was younger, more reserved but nice in her way too. The wife of the recent Liberal Candidate for South Shields, where, she told me, they had a much worse time than we did. No proper agent, no reliable organisation, an undercurrent of hostility between renegade National Libs and the old party. But her husband polled 9,000 votes and did not lose his deposit.
It is odd the knack English women have of making the worst of themselves. Mrs G. was really very pretty without her glasses and her hair loose prepared for a bath. But somehow we do our hair wrong, choose the worst sort of hats and the ugliest flower patterned materials. We look crumpled, neglected, as though we didn’t really care about clothes, yet that is rarely true. There is so obviously no precision, no discipline in our thinking about how we should dress. I came upon a 1938 newspaper photo of the King and Queen of Bulgaria the other day. The Queen was Parisianly chic, nothing ostentatious, a plain coat and skirt and felt hat, but everything was diamond sharp in outline and suitability and finish. One hardly ever sees an Englishwoman looking like that.
I listened last Saturday to the play with them. Miss C. kept dropping to sleep with short starting puffs and would jerk herself awake every now and then with same comment: ‘He’s left her!’
Monday, 11 September
11 p.m.: In a rage. Have not done my ironing. Have not done any house cleaning and the place a slum. This evening after writing N. and shoving down lousy supper, spent washing up, washing up, washing up. That damned damned sink.
And now two enormous blobs of ink from this trashy pen on a beloved Maltese cloth. In my despair I have scrubbed them with pumice which will weaken the fabric. Household Hints says use ‘oxalic acid’ as though one ordered it regularly with the rations.
Wednesday, 13 September
Tonight, a resolution I must make. But word it with care. I must go on trying to become a biographical writer. I am not established yet. Peg came my way, and has been an astonishingly lucky choice. I worked hard at it, but in great ignorance – the more I learn about such work, the more amazed am I at my temerity and my good fortune.
Let me recall the start. After leaving HDA in 1946 and making one or two half-hearted attempts to place articles and more successful efforts to take holiday paying guests, my thoughts turned to the eighteenth century, still with the idea of articles in my mind, but also wondering if I should try a biography. I was remembering a remark made by a lecturer at the Truth Club (I think it was called), a club to which Constance Oliver took me, a literary affair founded to encourage beginners but run by elderly people. This lecturer was a young man, a biographer, and speaking on his subject, and the only thing I remember of his lecture (and his white evening dress shirt front) was his advice to beginners to start with a biography – it was good exercise, good practice, he said.
And then on the BBC in the autumn, I think, of 1946, I heard Handel’s Water Music and the announcer’s introduction. It seemed strange that I should be able to hear those same notes played 200 years ago – they were a stronger link with the past than anything I could think of. The printed word grew out of date, its meaning changed with time. Paintings and drawings also remained in and of their period – but music, the sound, still lived, like sap in a tree. And I wondered what living ears had listened to at its first performance in that year 1748.184 And I began to go through, page by page, my (no, my brother’s but I use it) Harmsworth’s 1904 Encyclopaedia, picking out famous eighteenth-century characters who were alive in that year. Peg Woffington was on my list – Garrick’s paramour and other love affairs. But it was not just because of that that I picked her out. It was, as I have told many people, because I stuck a pin in my list and fell on her name.
I took the names given of the authorities on her – Daly, Molloy and Reade – and ordered them from the public library. And then I started at the BM. This is what amazes me, the extraordinary good fortune of it all. It took me months to find my way about the Reading Room catalogues (and I am still learning), and only very gradually discovered how little in this century had been written of any length on Peg. I don’t believe there can be another character with Peg’s appeal in this period that suited my abilities as a raw recruit, blundering, fumbling, ignorant of sources and references – everything in fact necessary for a serious biographer to know. It is incredible to me now that I achieved what I did, and that I actually caught a publisher before making the revision I did last winter. And there again in knowing Tom, another astonishing stroke of good luck.
What I am trying to get at is this. I whine for a sign from Heaven to show me what I should do, but surely there’s enough in all this to convince me if I will but open my eyes and heart to it? The way has been shown, fortune has been lavish. But I know what pulls me back and causes the doubt and confusion: the thought, hasn’t there been rather too much good luck about this? It is more than possible that with Peg, in my urgency and enthusiasm and anxiety, that I have made some bad scholastic mistakes.
Sunday, 24 September
Two things to record.
i) I have resigned from committee of local Liberals. I came to this decision last Monday when there was much talk of another election in near future. The thought of going through all that again clinched the matter and I phoned the chairman. What surprised me was my firmness and clarity throughout. I did not feel clear in my own thoughts about it but found myself speaking with conviction and point, reasons all coming pat, no hesitation anywhere. He took it well, and there! I am free again. The relief is tremendous.
ii) Lydia and I went to see The Cocktail Party on Friday.185 This is a really profound and most moving play, excellently produced and acted, though one could make niggardly criticisms. It had also – on Lydia too, I think – an extremely depressing effect. It left one feeling that here was truth, but without hope. Is the humdrum, then, all that is left?
But ordinary living isn’t humdrum. That is the point. It is often difficult and sometimes tedious, but there is so much pleasure to be had from apparently trivial things.
Wednesday, 27 September
Today I was not up till after 10.30, went shopping in village, home again, finished clarifying the fat which I have in quantity and have now stored in a big stone jar bought for 1s., did the flowers, had lunch, washed up, complicated and messy with dishes and saucepans covered in grease, did the ironing, had tea and knitted; then bottled six jars of fruit salad according to Daily Telegraph recipe (peaches, pears, apples, grapes, blackberries in syrup with a teaspoon of sherry and using snap closures). Supper – deep-fried fish and chips and spinach; then more knitting and the wireless. There has been a surfeit of plays and stories today. A matinee at 3; 4.15 Mrs Dale’s Diary; Children’s Hour; at 6 p.m. a talk on modern literature on the Third; at 8 p.m. Jack Hulbert in Madeleine (delightful); 9.30 Have a Go; at 10 Hardy’s Withered Arm; at 11 an instalment of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. All the while I was busy with domesticities I have been entertained or stimulated mentally – I love it, I love it.
Doctor says I must take iron pills for another month.
Friday, 29 September
Yesterday Oakdene Commemoration Day. I escaped after tea, the speeches were as much as I could bear – they go on too long. The best was the headmistress, always such a gallant little grey haired figure on that platform, aflame with zeal, devoutly following her dedicated path. All that she has said, each year I have attended these functions, I have heard before, years ago. I wonder why no old girl is ever congratulated on the public platform for getting married and rearing a family. Degrees and public appointments are acclaimed but never the successful wife and mother.
39.
How She Smells
Thursday, 4 November 1950
Bernard Shaw died this morning. This was not what I came to my journal for, but it has some bearing on what I would record. I think my little cat Dinah is dying. Thoughts on death have been with me, on and off, a long while. It is so commonplace, so inevitable – all religions of the present day, or th
e ones I know of, say soothing, reassuring things about it. But this only confuses me. In my heart I am frightened like a child threatened with loneliness in the dark. I have had to part with mother and father, Ethel has lost two brothers and a sister, she and Aunt M. will die, my brother will die, my turn will come. The light going out … that is what is so terrifying … into a darkness alone. It is having faith that matters but I seem to have so little. If I were faced with death without warning I might fly in a panic to the religion my mother taught me and hope it would carry me over.
Where will my little cat go when she goes at last? I cannot bear to think of her being anywhere unhappy. She has been the light of my life here at Wee from the very beginning, I have been thoughtless, ignorant, impatient with her, but her love for me has never lessened. Every time I returned home she would emerge from some secret waiting place, tail erect, ears eager, and then up on to my shoulder purring a welcome. She is too weak to combat the boisterous demands of her children, and I have shut her away in a box in my room. She hardly stirs from it and I know it might be kinder to take her to the clinic but I cannot bring myself to do it. Her little, delicate pointed face, with its tufted ears and amber eyes, her gaiety and patience with her babies, her tremendous pride when they were born, and her absolutely shameless flirtations in the amorous season in the garden. I cannot bear to think that my life with Dinah is nearly, maybe, at an end. This pain, this sense of losing things, of some sort of doom descending, has been haunting me.
Tuesday, 7 November
Dinah is still with me. She smells – dear, how she smells.
I have to reset my course. Publication of ‘Peg’ is to be delayed perhaps another year and with it my hopes of keeping the overdraft in check and all the possibilities of new contacts and interests that publication will bring. Lady S. cheered me somewhat this morning. The bestseller authoress, Doris Leslie has been in the neighbourhood and revealed that she also paints but chose writing because there was ‘more money in it.’186 I have no hopes or desires to be a bestseller, but I want to be able to support myself by biography. If only one could be sure. But there I go again with the desire for security instead of the hope adventurous. I don’t want to be and couldn’t be ‘famous’. I couldn’t speak on a platform or spontaneously in a broadcast programme. A real writer (like Shaw) has something to say which he can put into speech as well as on paper and I’ll never be that sort of writer. I’m not sure that I don’t distrust any other sort of writer as suspicious or deficient.
Wednesday, 8 November
I am starting seriously to plan for p.gs (P.G.s? – however one writes it, it tends to look like ‘pigs’) next year. I must get as many ads out as soon as possible from January, I am writing to friends in the north for suggestion for north-country papers, with eye on Festival of Britain visitors. If by having p.gs in quantity next spring and summer I can stop the drain on my capital and have something in hand for the next winter when money from ‘Peg’ may be coming in too – then I would forge ahead in earnest and without misgiving. I may of course fail in this plan, may make a horrid mess of it all, be unlucky with my guests, I may be ill again or get into trouble with landlady K.M., or the income tax authorities, and find myself in a worse state than before. Or we may be at war again or something disastrous may have happened that I can’t possibly foresee.
And yet how can one know what the future holds? Inflation, war, revolution – and all my assets may turn to worthless paper.
Friday, 10 November
I have had a reply from Curtis Brown’s office. They seem sympathetic about the delayed publication of ‘Peg’ and are trying to get the £100 advance money for me. But this will only be a small temporary (though not scorned) help. I suppose I can get no more after it until the book is out and selling and the £100 paid back – which may be another year or more.
Perhaps I shall be known as a good diarist when I am far beyond feeling any pleasure at such recognition. But as Frederick Laws has written, ‘the best diarists are not always the most successful people’. Have been re-reading journals again – from the beginning of year till now. I can never stop once I begin to do this, and only the fact of earlier volumes being buried in my old school play-box prevents my looking at them. A good diarist? I don’t know at all. There is a great thrum of passing planes overhead like a flight of bombers.
Sunday, 12 November
Yesterday afternoon as I cycled back from village through the Beeches I overtook Kay Hammond and John Clements with their two boxers. I did not recognise their back view, but they looked interesting – she without a hat in a slim leaf-brown pony skin coat and slacks, he also hatless in camel-hair belted overcoat. Then she turned and I heard that unmistakable voice saying, ‘You wouldn’t lose anything by not having the second bathroom …’ I longed to turn round and have a good stare at them both.
Je spoke of an Indian doctor at her hospital who practises hypnosis and took one patient right through an operation with it and also ‘controlled’ himself while having painful attention to his teeth.187 He sat, said Je, quite relaxed with hands folded in front of him, and conscious all the time. The control of pain, he told her, was widely practised in India, with hypnosis for all operations, but can only be done by people who have studied and disciplined themselves to it from youth. It would be almost impossible for any adult in the West without such training.
Did I say I decked out the sitting room with new curtains early this summer? Gay cretonne bought from John Lewis. All with the thought of having a presentable sitting room for possible visitors when ‘Peg’ was published. Oh, irony, irony! I feel like the donkey after the evasive carrot.
Rain again. I am an idle, vain, pea-brained, vacillating, silly wench, and have eaten too much sweet cake. Hugh Laming is married again. N. sent me a letter he wrote her when he and his 3rd wife were on holiday recently touring England by car. I have heard nothing from him for months and do not expect to. I feel quite out of touch now, as I told N., without rancour, as though the wires had rusted and broken by mutual consent. I do not mind at all that he continues to write to N.
Sunday, 19 November
The Irish – who can ever do them justice, write of them adequately, understand them? All words seem heavy in describing them. Their fey quality, their sensitive, imaginative, restless, nervous, defeatist natures … their endless talk, their recurrent laughter, their terrible despair, their idealism and their cynicism, their generosity and warmth, their heart-breaking casualness and unreliability, forever grasping at life and running away from it. Oh, I am thankful I’m not seriously involved with T.! I have learnt more about him in this weekend from P. and Mac than I could do in months or years of close association with him. I want to keep him in this perspective. I never want to fall under his spell again, never, he is not for me, not as I once thought I wanted him to be. He has a devastating way of flattering a woman’s vanity and making one believe he means more than he does – but Lord let me never be deceived again.
Their way of living is fantastic, unbelievable, yet it is true. All the mad things they speak of really happen, and frequently. Their incredible parties where everyone gets stone-cold drunk. Mac called to the phone finds a body by it on the floor and sits on its face; drinks too much Pernod and finds himself alone on a mountain and nearly paralysed, and, making his way with difficulty back to civilisation, comes upon a parked station-wagon in which he finds a woman stretched stark naked without sign anywhere of clothes or coverings near her. He staggered back to the party where no one took any notice of his story, picked up a valuable handwoven rug and returned with it to the corpse. Later, when he could persuade someone to go with him to the spot, the wagon, naked woman and rug had vanished, and he never discovered who she was.
They are such a motley, brilliant, scintillating crew; brilliant and neurotic – knowing they go towards their own damnation, it seems ingrained, inherent this belief. ‘The Celtic rot,’ says Mac lightly. The tragedy and sadness in their eyes is sometimes a
lmost unbearable. I hope T. can keep P. happy – as she obviously is now, in a trance, an ecstasy. But I do not envy her, I only hope she takes a little English sanity and stability with her to Dublin.
The Irish I think find us a little terrifying, our solidity and reserve which always increases when with them unless we have the knack of letting ourselves go with them. And perhaps they despise us too, for our dullness, our slow wittedness, our pompous attitude of patronage to them. Their faults are not unique to themselves – we suffer from them too, idleness, procrastination, impatience, and we could learn much from them in the way of living more adventurously, of taking life more easily. There is much to be said for their gaiety and inconsequence, their capacity for living in the present.
Wednesday, 22 November
I dreamt of slums: indescribable confusion. Trams in a narrow crowded thoroughfare all marked for destinations I knew not, and no link to anywhere familiar; policemen who could not help me; a butcher’s shop; side streets; green-grocery stalls; decrepit houses, hovels, waste heaps.
Monday, 27 November
Woke this morning at 8, raw, foggy. Tea and cereal in bed reading The God That Failed.188
Decide to have some Nescafe and biscuits then go into village. Have to clean and tidy self. Been making my own ‘Quickies’ – little pads of cotton wool soaked in own-made astringent lotion and left in glass jar with screw lid. Highly successful and will be much cheaper. Make out shopping list, pump bike tyres. Go to grocers, no, fishmonger first, buy heads and beef sausages for cats; return a cream cheese to grocer. Believe that if local tradespeople find you honest, they will not cheat back, though I may be wrong. I rarely bother to check accounts; but did look at grocer’s book today and found they’d been charging me for Picture Post which stopped months ago. Then to buy kettle-descaler from electricians and tell them clock had gained 10 mins since last week’s power cut.
A Notable Woman Page 47