A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  ‘The characteristic of the spoiled child and of the nervous state is,’ (Graham Howe writes) ‘… that there must be neither time nor space unfilled. We must learn to suffer emptiness … To come to terms with nothingness.’

  This is at the core of many of my fretful moods. I am often conscious of emptiness, a hollow, a cavern which I have seen as a fault, a lack in me (the empty womb) – particularly when some heavy piece of work or special activity is concluded. An unhappy space within is suddenly apparent as the bustle and pressure of work and obligation subsides. And so the space has to be filled. Be busy now: clean the house, weed the garden, sew, listen to the radio, go to the pictures, have a cigarette – or write in here. Or sleep. Yes, even sometimes one can fill the space for a little while with sleep until one’s dreams grow too troubling.

  Far too much of this journal – I now can see – is an attempt to fill a vacuum which should have been faced and suffered, not avoided. There are certain intervals in time which are meant to be silent pauses. If I could describe this in musical terms I could make it clearer: music does not fill the listener’s ear with notes continually; the pauses, the intervals, are all part of the whole composition which could have no value without them. We have to learn how to wait (idle) in peace, alone, suspended like stars in the sky.

  ‘Cigarettes and pipes,’ continues Graham Howe, ‘fill up our empty spaces. We seem to need a lot of these soothing stimulants to satisfy our restless and unfocused energies, but it cannot be good for health in body or mind to rely on these external “dummies”. They are nervous props, false substitutes for real limbs. The cure, I think, is not to stop our smokes and drinks … But to develop instead our own real limbs, strengthening our positive interests and attitudes by making them do some work themselves, until we no longer need narcotic comfort.’

  But do not suppose, dear gentle reader, that because you have managed to give up smoking, or do not like it, that you are therefore one of the elite with all limbs grown and working. I can think of half a dozen people, straight away, who do not smoke but they do not seem to me any better psychologically. This is not to excuse myself, but only to warn myself and others that to be without or to rid oneself of one particular nervous prop does not mean we have no need of others.

  This then I must do: learn to come to terms with the hollow within, the vacancy, the gulf where no bridge is. And I must not do it by rushing to these pages. Wait. Endure the silence, the suspense, the uncertainty. The music has not ceased.

  The road to self-knowledge is long and full of blind alleys.

  Thursday, 14 August

  Today Eden married Clarissa Churchill. A surgeon was lowered 1,235 feet into a cavern in the Pyrenees to attend an explorer lying unconscious with a damaged spine. And little Babs Pratt sailed in the Golfito for Barbados.

  I am free. My four years of stewardship are over. I wondered on the way home from seeing her into the train at Waterloo whether the experience has washed through or over me. Tonight as I went through the things she has left behind – discarded clothes and trinkets – I knew. It was an experience we both hated and wanted done with. I realise how much she hated it when I found odds and ends I had given her which are now as it were thrown back at me. None of them of value – most in fact are rubbish and only fit for the wpb, but there were two which have a certain quality she failed to recognise, and I felt that if she had had the smallest real feelings of affection for me she would have kept them. Both are so small they could have gone together in her handbag.

  I saw behind that sullen barrier and felt the wave of her hatred and impatience for England and everything that I love and value in it. I tried to make her happy. God I did try to make Wee the best possible substitute for the home she lacked here. On the surface I succeeded – she reached a measure of content. I could never of course give her what only a parent can, but I failed to give her what even an aunt can.

  My heart wasn’t in it. My heart was numb with impatience and pride and fear – there was no spark, no living link between us. Our differences seemed and still seem so insurmountable. I feel that my brother and his family are lost to me.

  B. gave me some irises for the garden as a parting gift – quite unexpectedly – which was sweet and touching. But the giving of gifts is a formula with her – she’s too easily generous in this way. It is the word, the feeling of gratitude one hungers for. If only she could have said ‘thank you for looking after me’. Youth is always the same. Too young to know, to understand. I hear it echoed on all sides from hurt, exasperated parents.

  Not a sigh of regret from B. at leaving Wee, not a turn of the head or one word to the cats. Then the wait at the station where (four years ago) I had met the rude ragamuffin little schoolgirl. The polite farewell kiss. And we both I do believe heaved huge sighs of relief. Only tonight among the abandoned trinkets did I weep, realising my failure. Dear God forgive me, forgive me.

  Later: I do not blame B. I did not expect her to share my intellectual interests or to see life from my angle. I tried to reach her level and not be scathing or critical of things she is not yet able to understand or view as one does from mid-maturity. I tried to be patient, to listen, to share what I could of her activities and interests. I must not forget the action of time on seeds sown in these past years. What I have done and what I’ve neglected to do: all will bear fruit of some sort in due season, the good and the ill.

  I have learned something. I’ve seen my own adolescence again from a middle-aged viewpoint. How cruel we were. I have been despised as I once despised. B. despised me because I was not a Tory, I lived alone, was manless, and I did not spend my days in a whirl of social engagements. I was never, as far as I can judge, a positive influence for good in moulding her ideas, nor so acceptable as an aunt that she showed any pride in the relationship to friends and acquaintances. There was never any ‘auntie you must meet so-and-so’. I wonder sometimes what sort of impression she must have given of me to people I didn’t meet.

  I never forced any of my ideas on her: I was probably much too hesitant and cautious about this. Once she exclaimed ‘how stupid!’ when something was said about the segregation of the coloured people in South Africa. I might have started a discussion then of the colour problem which she’ll meet sharply in Barbados (see Patrick Leigh Fermor’s opinion of Barbados in The Traveller’s Tree).203 But would anything I, the despised aunt, have said made any difference? She is too lazy, too eager for a good time, too practical and matter-of-fact to let such things as principles, ideals or politics disturb her. This is not to say she has no feeling or imagination. I can see her making a fair success of her life, if she keeps within her limitations and never feels an urge to move from the familiar sphere to a larger but less kindly one.

  My point is that unless one is sure of youth’s affection and respect, anything controversial will be taken with a sneer, and to press one’s opinions may only increase the opposition to them, doing more harm than good. So that the first aim in a relationship of this kind is to win and establish a bond of trust and affection which isn’t done by being dogmatic and pompous.

  Well that is off my chest now. I have finished this in bed on Saturday morning and must get up and on with the cleaning up and tidying. She is a dear little soul, with lots and lots of sterling qualities. One must be amused not angry when, after she has with a flourish ‘spring cleaned’ her room and beaten the mats (a minute or two of banging at them in the garden) one finds inches of fluff in a forgotten corner, the empty bookshelves undusted, the wash basin still dirty. (One is only angry at the thought that she may have thought Auntie wouldn’t notice.) She likes, thoroughly enjoys, she says, house work. Good luck to her, the poppet. May she still enjoy it after years of doing it daily.

  Monday, 1 September

  Cat week over. The Pewter Puss triumphant with a 2nd and three reserves.

  A letter of thanks from Babs. Prompted by her own conscience or Mama I know not, but it was welcome.

  Tuesday, 2 Septe
mber

  I am trying to live, to pay for everything, on a limit of £5 a week.

  Monday, 8 September

  I don’t know how anyone manages to live on £5 or less a week these days. Insurance, cleaners, milk, bread, laundry – all these bills last week were heavy, so that I had to spend £4 of my allotted £5 on them alone. Now I am faced with the August grocery and butcher’s accounts, which will need nearly £6 to settle. The quarterly electric light and heat bill came this morning – not formidable, but still another £1 4s. 6d. to find somehow.

  It’s a headache, and I have decided I must sell my fur coat. I never much liked it and didn’t wear it all that often. Nice to have for an occasion, but the occasion is seldom, if ever, one when the good winter coat would not do just as well. I do not think there is anything else I can sell now, except my mother’s engagement ring stored in the bank, and old-fashioned diamonds aren’t of much value today. Anyway I do not think it can have been an expensive ring as Pop was then young and poor.204

  Monday, 15 September

  Autumn has come too soon. One thinks of the thin frocks and blouses hanging in cupboards, behind doors, left over chair-backs, in the hope that tomorrow we may don them yet once more before we settle into coats and skirts and twinsets. (The well-dressed English woman’s winter day uniform is the tweedy skirt and soft wool twinset – it has been an essential part of the wardrobe for years now.)

  Thinking about an essay for this year’s Observer competition, announced yesterday. I must try. Oh how lovely to win £100 (or even £10!) and a little success.

  Saturday, 27 September

  More reviews of Peg have come. All very encouraging.

  I am only just living within the £5 a week limit. The only things on which I could cut down with effort are smoking and cats. On smoking, if I could give it up entirely, I should have an extra 20 or 30 shillings a week, and if I reduced my cat family to one or none I’d save at least another 15s. to 20s. on the food for them. I urgently need new bedroom slippers, must collect secateurs being repaired, want to have a frock dyed, some shoes mended and hair done, ought to visit Ethel one day, and so on. I must see about selling the fur coat. After that? Deluge?

  42.

  Self-knowledge

  Friday, 3 October 1952

  ‘When a woman is able to sit down to make the most of the evening – most of the evening’s gone.’ (Harrabin, News Chronicle)

  It is despairing the way housework and other obligations rise like a barrier before one. Life is full of little things – they clutter one’s day, and one forgets them and then wonders why one has ‘no time’. The light in the sitting room that went wrong. A new hook I put up in this room. The fur woman, Mrs Read, whom I phoned about the coat, which had to be carefully packed and registered to her – I wait now for the verdict. I doubt if I’ll ever have another fur coat. For one reason I may not be able to afford it; for another, am at last receiving literature from the UFAW,205 learning something about the abomination of trapping.

  This place is old and damp and badly in want of a good paint. Walls peel and flake and create dust, and the old stone floor in the kitchen is cracked and its rough surface catches ash and grit from the fire. Every room and stairwell needs redecorating thoroughly. I would have good hard washable paint on all walls. New flooring for the bedrooms – close compact flooring which will polish easily. All this and more is really urgently necessary, would run into several hundred pounds, and would in the end reduce my labour considerably.

  The maddening, irritating thing is that I might have had much of all this done if I’d known I was going to be here so long. Ever since I came I have looked on Wee as a temporary lodging, not knowing what new change the next year might bring in my life – yet all the while feeling myself growing roots here deeper and deeper.

  Thursday, 16 October

  The Dinah book came back from Hurst & Blackett via Curtis Brown yesterday. It is ‘not in their usual line of books,’ but they will always be interested in my ‘straight’ work. This is galling, though not perhaps surprising.

  I’ve sent it personally to Michael Joseph with a letter. If Joseph shows no interest then I must face defeat – I shall be bitterly disappointed and despairing. But I hope, positively, determinedly, that he, a great cat lover, will see what I am trying to do and give me some encouragement.206 I believe the Hurst & Blackett readers did not get beyond the first two chapters. Oh, the humiliation!

  Cannot find a buyer for the fur coat. Don’t seem able to sell anything! One feels bruised and ashamed, as though one had exposed one’s naked body to the wrong man.

  Sunday, 19 October

  Study of theosophy draws me so much that I cannot keep away from it. One has to make a feature of surrender and accept what the teachers say are fundamental principles as true. In all religions one has to start with an intuitive belief in God or goodness, and it cannot be ‘proved’ technically by the intellect. If the tenets work for you, help you to become a better person and to ‘see’ what was before obscure, then they have value and may be used without misgiving.

  I must pull myself away from this, down to mundane matters. Yesterday my 43rd birthday was spent very pleasantly with E. and Aunt M. at Wembley. Today rain all day (I love rainy days – they enclose, isolate me, leaving me free to indulge my idleness and contemplation). My overdraft has reached £100 again and I must visit the bank. That, work and chores are the main activities I see before me this week. Oh the chores, chores. In emancipating themselves, women also emancipated the char, as men keep telling us; we have freed ourselves only into the bondage of the sink.

  Monday, 20 October

  Had tea and received my neighbour Lady S., who is involved in altercation with new neighbour, Joan Hammond, about trees which overhang Lady S.’s garden and which Lady S. wants to cut down. She thinks J.H. is a lesbian, but this does not worry her. Conversation concerning other people’s morals led to discussion of our surrounding ‘soaks’, which does disgust us.

  Nearly everyone around here seems to drink heavily, and we wonder how they can afford it. Really the people in the Avenue are a frightful crowd! (I’m not being ‘superior’.) The G.F.s, Jasper G., the L.D.s, Mrs H. (a ‘kept’ woman unashamedly), Mrs F., another soak, old M., another heavy drinker. It is sad, for they are all attractive-looking decent people, most of them young, with children and lovely homes. Such a waste of vitality, and all, as the Theosophists would say, making bad Karma for themselves. I can’t say that I’ve kept apart because of anything specially virtuous in me. Only my shyness and inability to be what they would think a good ‘mixer’ have kept me from this puddle.

  Tuesday, 21 October

  I am now within a few pages of that part in Light on the Path reached by the group, and shall be able to relax this small intense effort to catch up, and follow on with them.207 I think theosophy may help me greatly. If it is ‘wrong’ – i.e. if the originators of this modern movement have in some way erred and are leading us a little awry, which may be so – I am in no position to judge at present. If it helps me to become a better and bigger person – or, as they would say, if it helps me towards merging ‘personality’ with ‘individuality’ – then it is the right and good thing for me now and I must pursue it sincerely.

  Now I desire power. Not worldly power, but the power a disciple must surely have before he can even begin his training: the power of inner stability, to be able to go one’s own way steadily without being intimidated, swayed or pushed by others. To be able to hold steadily to one’s independent thought, and without being intolerant; to be able to withstand attack without cringing; to be able to speak out plainly and calmly when the need arises: in a group without being paralysed without self-consciousness, and to another person without being confused by fear.

  I desire also some return for the labour I love most. Without my writing I should be very depressed and unhappy, and without some material reward within the next four years I do not know how I shall be able to satisfy the
needs of my physical body.

  Sunday, 9 November

  The Dinah book came back from Joseph, but with an extremely kind letter. He liked it but cannot take it, as it is their policy not to publish too many books on one subject, and their cat quota is well filled.

  Sunday, 22 November

  Phone Miss Barry. She (furrier and dressmaker in Windsor) suggested I bring the musquash for her to see. I have advertised the musquash in The Lady, had several enquiries, but unfortunately all lost while coat was kept on approval for a week by one lady and returned because it was too small for her.

  Later: Miss B. could not take the coat (like all my things, too shabby for a good sale).

  Yesterday I invested in a pair of Dolcis woolly lined bootees for £3. I can’t afford it, but I know I have done the right thing. They are navy suede without zip or laces, reach only to the ankles, with opening down instep for easy access. They are for fine weather only and I must not garden in them. Have been wearing them ever since my return yesterday p.m. (except in bed) and know I shall live in them. I had also to buy some Marks & Spencer winter lock-knit woolly pants, hideous but warm and cheap.

  Sunday, 23 November

  I have just typed out new instructions for the disposal of my journals in event of some disastrous accident or sudden death to myself. I have been wanting to get this done, though if God wills and I am spared I would like to prepare them for publication myself in say 20 years’ time. It seems as though I am enormously conceited about them. There must be hundreds of other writers and diarists with similar plans.

  Yet I feel that they should have their chance. Once written, they lose (as Peg has) their link with me and take on an identity of their own. It is for this, their opportunity, that I prepare now, in case I am not able to do all that I should like to do for them. Not knowing who my executors may be yet (one might even be Babs) I must leave some guidance to those who have to clear up when I am gone.208 I have no intention whatever of dying yet if I can help it, but forethought of emergency is part of my nature, just as I keep rather too many tinned foods and preserves.