A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  I have grown a little suspicious of Mass Observation. Tom Harrisson has settled in foreign parts, and from what I hear, it sounds as though organisation is now rather Communist dominated. I do not wish to offend my own Communist friends, but I do not feel I can trust the English Communists, as they are at present, to take on the guardianship of my journals.

  Thursday, 27 November

  The Princess Helena College Old Girls newssheet arrived yesterday. Miss Parker is reported as having read and ‘so enjoyed’ Jean Pratt’s book Lovely Peggy. This really is very high praise.

  Saturday, 29 November

  Oh I do wish I had a portable wireless – then I could get into bed and listen to the play.

  Sunday, 30 November

  An interesting article on creativeness in a recent TLS. I think mentions one of the old philosophers who lay in bed until 11 or later, finding that his ideas during that time flowed most freely. One is much too afraid of being lazy, or of being accused of laziness.

  8.45 p.m. My jobs for the day done, I had a sudden whim while reading Boswell’s London Journal to collect all the journals I have in my ‘library’ and see what others did on a last Sunday in November. In 1662 Pepys woke on the morning of the 27th to find ‘the tops of the houses covered with snow, which is a rare sight, which I have not seen these three years’. The next day … he went off to attend the funeral of Sir Richard Stayner at the Ironmongers’ Hall.

  On Sunday, November 28th, one hundred years later, Boswell breakfasted with Margaret Douglas, heard a sermon on the advantages of early piety at St James’s while he planned his next amorous adventure, walked in the park, dined off veal and pudding and went to Sheridan’s in the evening.

  Kilvert does not seem to have recorded many last Sundays in November, but his entry for Monday, November 28th 1870 begins: ‘A plaintive mew outside the door. I open the door and tabby Toby comes trotting in with his funny little nod of affection.’ On Sunday, November 28th 1897, Arnold Bennett’s friend Webster told him a true ghost story. In 1914 Barbellion heard a Sir Henry Wood concert at the Albert Hall. Katherine Mansfield seems only to date the first months of the year in her journals, as though she began each year with a good resolution to keep a diary and petered out by March. The only other diary I can find is Mr Pooter’s, which cannot be extracted from its context.

  And I have to finish my Sunday cleaning up a mess made by Spot, who has diarrhoea and worms.209

  Saturday, 6 December

  Most strangely I am a stranger in my own house. I left an hour ago to go to town, but the worst fog of the year has clamped down on us (AA reports the worst fog in London they had known). No buses are running, and one or two people have walked from Slough to Farnham Common. I walked into the village to buy cigarettes and collect my paper and came home again through the mystery-heavy frost-white woods. The fog shows no sign of clearing. The cold penetrates everywhere.

  Sunday, 7 December

  I went to town yesterday. I felt tremendously bold and adventurous not knowing what lay ahead. The fog in London was dense and yellow, penetrating every corner. At Paddington the air was so thick it was really like pea soup. What surprised and excited me was the great movement of the populace. Everywhere was thronged with people, keyed up, friendly, determined not to be beaten by the elements – it was worth the journey to have experienced that.

  The British Museum portico was shrouded, one could not see the pediment properly. One felt one was entering an ancient temple in another age to take part in mysterious rites. Fog hung all over the Reading Room. I worked for little more than an hour and started home again.

  In Slough it was like a blanket. I found a long queue at the 441 stop. We waited and we waited. There were no 441s. A conductress in a passing bus for the station shouted that there were no more buses. If only, I thought, I had begun to walk home at once, I would by then have been half way home. I fortified myself with tea and baked beans on toast at the cinema café, turned up my coat collar and secured it with scarf tied round beret and under my chin, and set forth. Worse things could happen.

  Until well past The George stop at Farnham Royal the main road was well-lit and the way was easy. But then the road lamps cease, hedges are high, and lights from houses few and far between. I had a torch, but the battery was nearly finished and I feared it would not last. As I stumbled upon a grass verge I heard footsteps and voices behind me and saw a beam from a stronger torch. Warily I fell in with the travellers – two girls and a man. The man was going to Farnham Common, the girls had to get to Beaconsfield. They dropped off at the Jolly Butcher, looking for adventure perhaps (‘Will some kind gentleman see me home?’). I plodded on with the man who had the strong torch.

  My companion was an assistant at one of the tailors in the village. He had gone to meet his daughter from the Slough telephone exchange, but missed her. One can walk 10–15 miles in fine daylight without resentment or fear – it is the thought of 5 miles through a fog at night which is the main obstacle, and of losing one’s way, becoming ill, meeting with robbery, rape or assault.

  As we climbed, the fog thinned rapidly and in Farnham Common stars were visible. The village lights welcomed us and people were about. One man was anxious for his wife who had left at 1.30 to go to Hounslow. There must have been many held-up, lost, frightened …

  I was indoors by 8.30, and within the hour had fed and settled the cats and was seated on sitting room sofa consuming an enormous salad and fruit meal and listening to Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, feeling thoroughly happy and triumphant. I have not felt so happy for months.210

  Tuesday, 9 December

  Modern Theosophy: the meetings I have attended excite, confuse and exhaust me. It is an intellectual excitement, new ideas helping to crystallise already present knowledge. What I want is to learn to be calm, to attain that stability which stands in storm (strength without rigidity; confidence without conceit; humility without servility).

  How does one learn to become calm? I am now looking at the Theos Soc’s ‘Study Course in Meditation’ published this year. Earnest meditation, or Christian prayer, is the answer. It is as simple, and as difficult, as that.

  There is in me a hard crust I cannot break down. It is (I think) the result of mental habits which developed early, which I used as a refuge (as so many of us do) from experiencing pain. But my mental powers are not, perhaps fortunately, strong enough to have made me into a successful intellectual at the expense of my emotions.

  The Theosophists have a much larger and deeper explanation for all this. I am, they will say, still chained to my personal nature, entangled with environmental difficulties, and no amount of mental gymnastics will be likely to alter this attitude. Now, say the Theosophists, meditation ‘will bring about noticeable changes in the whole personality’. It brings ‘serenity of mind’ and ‘stabilises the whole psyche in its reactions to living’. The true goal of meditation is ‘to prepare the personal nature … to change the habitual, automatic reactions of the personal nature so that this becomes tranquil and more open to influence of the spirit … so that in time the personal enters into conscious relationship with the Universal.’

  I desire tranquillity in the true and deepest meaning of the word.

  Friday, 12 December

  The Dinah book back again, not wanted.

  What a perpetual, remorseless battle living is. I think my heart is numb. It’s crept away into shelter from this fresh setback. It is so tender with swollen conceit of itself that the world’s indifference to its good intentions is just too much, cannot stand it. Oh well. On, on.

  Tuesday, 16 December

  I have invested in an ‘Apal’. This is an imitation cigarette filled with certain harmless chemicals which when drawn upon give off a cool, faintly pepperminty flavoured vapour. You keep the ‘dummy’ in your mouth and pull hard for as long as you have a craving to smoke. I only started this after tea when all my cigarettes were finished. If you can keep it instead of a cigarette for two or three days,
the craving for nicotine will subside (say the Apal makers) and gradually disappear altogether, but you will not be left with a craving for the Apal instead. It helps you through the transition period.

  If I cannot break the habit with this, I never shall. It is, I feel sure, my last chance. The Apal makers publish dozens of testimonials of its success with every variety of hardened pipe and cigarette smoker, some at 60 who had smoked 40–50 in a day. I cannot be so different from all these people. But oh, if I do it, what joy and jubilation! What triumph! What a crying of the news in the market square!

  Boxing Day

  I persevered with the Apal from Tuesday evening until Saturday midday, but found not the slightest alteration in my desire for an ordinary cigarette. If anything, the craving increased. All very disappointing and shaming – since Saturday I have been smoking as much as ever. It seems to be much more than a superficial physical craving. As for sweets, for instance.

  Against my intentions I have been drawn into the Xmas whirlpool of good will and overeating. The Mitchells persuaded me to spend the day with them yesterday. I had breakfast in the sitting room by a fire kept in all night, and opened some parcels kept for the occasion. Room is gay with many cards and some decorative greenery, tinsel and baubles. I am a very lucky, spoilt person.

  Sunday, 28 December

  The kind of success I want will come when I have earned it, but whether it will ever do so in this life sometimes seems remote. Reading the winning essays on ‘Eyes’ in today’s Observer I can see where mine fails and how much more worthy of reward are the three first winners. Yet it is bitter and disconcerting that I couldn’t achieve even a £10 reward. I felt that really my little effort stood a chance. It was competing against 4,855 other efforts.

  Monday, 29 December

  One ray from a brighter day comes to cheer me. Hurst and Blackett are at last advertising Lovely Peggy in The Observer.

  Friday, 9 January 1953

  What have I done since Christmas? I have attended a lovely cocktail party given by Gwen Silvester (now Mrs Derrick Franklyn), and received there much praise and encouragement re Peg. Have found homes for two kittens and am advertising in The Cat for the third. Have had drain dug up and repaired. Went shopping in Windsor. Prepared for a tea party for Lydia and her nephew and friend Rita, but nephew had bilious attack so they could not come. Went to town shopping, trying to sell fur coat once more and was told it was hardly worth £10.

  I still feel hard hit from recent disappointments, and an article in Daily Telegraph by H.E. Bates about the difficulty of the ‘young’ (i.e. not yet established) writer today. One’s work now must be absolutely first class before anyone will look at it, and not only that but saleable. It must sell, sell, sell, and therefore Women’s Mag drivel is better from a worldly standard than half-baked highbrow efforts. I am indeed, when I look into it, in a fearful rage: an inner sea seething and tumultuous with cross-currents of despair and self-contempt. What is the good of my going on trying? Go back to your suburbs – back to the village street, the carpenter’s bench, you poor and puny, despicable stupid woman.

  Tuesday, 20 January

  It requires training and discipline, said someone on a radio programme recently, to make good use of leisure. It certainly does. And I fear I am not proving worthy.

  Is it vanity that makes me want to go on writing? I think I shall always want to write – what I am up against are defects of character. Now it is inertia I am having to fight. At other times it is timidity, or impatience.

  Let us now look on the credit side of this depressing picture. The cottage is moderately clean and tidy in all the rooms. The cats are in good health, well and regularly fed. I have managed to date to keep cigarette consumption to 20 or less a day. I can still dress myself adequately for modest social occasions.

  Sunday, 1 February

  My Observer essay returned with printed slip to say it was one of the 214 chosen from the total of 4,855 entries for consideration. This was the ‘sign’ I so sorely needed. My labour and judgement were not in vain.

  Saturday, 14 February

  This morning woke to find a world white with snow. I was the only passenger on the 8.24 bus at Hedgerly Corner. A world in white. Even the Trading Estate and the first drear reaches of Slough were transformed.

  Sweets went off the ration last week. I’ve died laughing since at the number of men I’ve seen nibbling chocolate and sucking toffees. Bless them – did they before all hand over their rations to the kiddies, or were they ashamed to exhibit their sweet tooth, or are they now revealed as plain greedy?

  A Theosophist public meeting on Tuesday. This was I think the only Theos gathering I’ve attended this year. I find I am a little put off Theosophy by Theosophists.

  Yesterday morning in the tube I was attracted by a couple obviously at the start of an illicit love affair. Do not ask me how I knew. Something in the man’s pink, excited, nervous, pop-eyed face and the way his body leaned towards the woman’s; something in the way she looked at him – assurance, triumph, a sort of proprietary attitude that hadn’t deep roots. To my utter amazement I saw them again in the evening in the carriage I was in. In identical seats too – the woman looking rather more puffy and lewd, her leer at him quite revolting. But for the fact that she wasn’t busy with the crossword she was doing in the morning I’d have believed it was a sort of mirage. They did not on either occasion once touch each other, no linking of hands or meeting of elbows or shoulders, but each body yearned towards the other. Neither was striking in appearance, both near 40 perhaps, nor were they ugly or ill-dressed (and she was not a professional tart). I wonder if I ever struck anyone like this during one of my own silly amorous adventures.

  This evening I found awaiting me a letter from my new accountant to say I have about £20 income tax rebate to come; and liver from the butcher; and coal. All unexpected good things.

  Sunday, 15 February

  ‘During one of my silly amorous adventures’. How very superior that sounds. I did not mean it so, as though beyond such folly. Indeed I am not, but chance is a fine thing, and all my energies are directed to my writing now.

  Lydia has left her job and plunged recklessly into doing what she wants to do. She had suddenly decided she could not bear an office job a moment longer and gave in her notice, and now she is settling in (with a knitting machine) to keep herself by the hand-craft work she loves and is so good at, though she does this accompanied by many fears and doubts of the kind I know well. People tell her that she’ll never make a living on her own, and I’m sure it will be uphill work at first, but I am sure also that she is right to try. Making loose covers, clothes, decorating a room, cooking, sweet-making and so on. I admire her for taking the plunge.

  Monday, 16 February

  ‘I never noticed this before,’ he said, touching the high book rests where I was poring over an encyclopaedia. And so a casual conversation began, until someone turned round and frowned at us. Conversation is not encouraged in the Reading Room.

  He was elderly, muffled up in scarf and greatcoat, might have been 60, with fairish hair, pale blue eyes and light lashes. I found myself saying that I had written a biography of Peg, loved the research, had been to London University. ‘You must come and have some tea with me, I won’t disturb you now.’

  And panic seized me. He smiled and patted my hands. I won’t be pawed, I thought later. Yet there was something warming about him. He’d have had my life history out of me before I knew where I was, and at 4.15 I ran away.

  Here is the beginning again of the same old story. I was deeply immersed in my subject, and shocked out of it by this friendly approach. But I think a woman’s loneliness sometimes outlines her like an aura, and just as some people can see the psychic variety, so others can sense this. There she is, over 30, still rather attractive, ringless left hand, and beneath that surface absorption her hungriness apparent, solitary in that single bedsitter – easy game. A little flattery (‘You look very clever.’ Oh Go
d, who wants to look clever? ‘I am sure you are someone famous … were you at Oxford or Cambridge?’), a few leading questions and her story is out without knowing the first item in the hunter’s. Beware, lonely women, of this bloodsucker, and don’t be easy game, or you’ll be over the tripwire and then God help you.

  This isn’t being cowardly or even prudent, just wise. This kind of trickster can see that your vanity is at low ebb, has long desired fuel, and if you’re not aware that it’s your vanity he’s playing up to, you are in for much heartbreak and humiliation. Be wise, run away, withhold yourself. If the man is really interested in you and not feeding his own vanity (which is what the trickster is always doing on these occasions, so never imagine that you yourself have much to do with the situation) – if, I repeat, he is interested in you and not in himself, he’ll come back, he’ll pursue you in the orthodox and civilised manner. Remember, shift the focus from yourself to the stranger … and don’t give yourself away in handfuls in the first five minutes.

  My imagination got busy at once after he’d gone. Supposing he was Osbert Sitwell, I thought.

  Saturday, 21 February

  I saw no more of the old boy who made advances last Monday. I may have maligned him, deeply hurt and offended someone with quite honest, honourable and kindly intentions. Or he may of course have forgotten all about me and his invitation. I had my apologies ready next day (shopping in Oxford Street and a train to catch – all true), but he did not appear. It was the way in which he patted and pressed my hands when he left me that got my hackles standing. I don’t think I was wrong.

  How sick I am of train and tube and bus filled with the world’s workers! Oh dear Lord, make me more charitable and generous and loving. They do bore me so these people. There they are, day in and day out on platforms, in carriages, in the streets, tramping, standing, sitting in crowds and crowds, moving all the time like one river there is no stopping – I cannot bear it! When much in London, my dreams are always choked with these images.