A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  Our littleness, our second-rateness in this age is a very big problem. There is so much of it. It’s no use being envious of the giants above us and trying to imitate them. We have got to understand ourselves, each individual separately, our limitations and apparently endless capacity for failure.

  Yesterday I was absolutely sucked under by Witch B.’s oppressive, malevolent mood.215 She is an abominable old woman, though an excellent worker and thoroughly trustworthy with one’s possessions. With one breath she tells me that if she had the chance again she’d stay single, and in the next can’t understand why I live here alone. Again, she thinks I’m ‘crrool’ to rear kittens and then let them go to new strange homes, then wants me to get rid of all the cats except one. These two themes repeat and repeat like a gramophone record, whatever I may do or say to try to enlighten her. When I say I like living here on my own, and that I adore all my cats with passion, she obviously doesn’t believe me. She only wants to see me behaving as she thinks I ought to behave. I don’t know how one is supposed to deal with this type of ox-like stupidity. I am torn inside with rage at it. To tolerate intolerance is perhaps the hardest kind of tolerance to practise. The trouble is, I’m still too anxious for universal approval of all I am and do.

  Tuesday, 22 June

  Was in a jangle today, all because of a hat I wore to town yesterday and which I soon realised – but too late to do anything about it – was hideous on me. But I endured it, and as soon as I was home again I ripped it to pieces and spent the afternoon remaking: the result I think is going to be a success.

  Does it matter what one looks like? Should one mind so much? Isn’t it vanity? Desire to attract attention, to be thought well-of and so forth? Not entirely, I’ve decided. I don’t see why anyone should look plainer or more ugly than they need. I think one should try to be as pleasant as possible to look at: well groomed, neat but not gaudy, to wear colours and clothes that become one without being conspicuous – to be easy on the eye, as the saying goes, without necessarily attracting the wrong sort of eye.

  I am determined to master the hair and hat problem. Luckily my figure is easier to manage. It causes me no anguish or anxiety, and for that at least let me be truly thankful.

  Wednesday, 23 June

  Heiress Caroline returns from Harper’s. The whole mood of living darkens as the weather brightens.

  Oh the dreariness, the utter abysmal hell of rejection, of being shut out, not wanted, a failure. All the success and happiness of one’s life depending on capital inherited – unearned, perhaps undeserved. But I’ve got to live with it. Must try to understand the sensitive, spoilt, imaginative little girl – so easily hurt, so easily made to feel deprived. Oh, the scent of roses: heavenly, heavenly indifferent summer’s day.

  Long ago, while my mother was alive and I was still very young, Ethel was Miss Watson who came sometimes to tea. She was told one day by my mother, ‘Jean’s writing a story.’ ‘Put me in it, won’t you?’ asked Miss Watson, and little Jean answered, ‘Oh yes, I will!’

  11.15 p.m.: And how could I have forgotten! Hurst & Blackett are selling off the 1,000 remaining copies of Peg.

  Midsummer Day

  Pet Shop woman in village tells me there’s a big demand for cat kennels. If only I could take the plunge at once! If only I knew what it is I should do. In this mood I’d welcome another war. Then the decision would be taken for me.

  Sunday, 27 June

  Yesterday a letter arrived from Halliday at H. & B. saying how sorry he was that they have to remainder Peg, but urging me not to be discouraged. In the circumstances, he and the MD were prepared to write off my debt for proof correction (standing at £25). My joy and gratitude for this thoughtful gesture are inexpressible. £25 won’t mean much to H. & B., but was bothering me quite a bit. I have written H. mentioning ‘Caroline’, though not of course that she’s been rejected by Harper’s. Still thinking about cat kennels.

  Tuesday, 13 July

  Too excited tonight to fall asleep easily. I’ve seen super excellent cat kennels this p.m. Mrs Turney’s at Holyport, just outside Maidenhead. They are an inspiration. She can take up to 40 cats at a time, and must have accommodation for nearly as many dogs. The boarded cats live all the time in single roomy pens in spotless, warm, dry sunny sheds. All looked perfectly happy and in good health. She says they do not need exercise. The precautions she takes against disease and infection are admirable. She charges only 15 shillings per week per cat. I begin to feel my way a little.

  Sunday, 14 August

  I’ve had paying guests – all nice, very nice. But I realised that I didn’t want to depend on this means of a livelihood. I get sick to death of having strangers about the place. When they are here, however pleasant, appreciative, interesting, I just long and long for them to pay up and leave. The work is endless drudgery in the main.

  As for the cat kennels. I would at least have a shot at it if Wee were mine. I could start here in a very modest way and build up a reputation. But with the very minimum of alterations to garden sheds necessary, would cost between £40–£50. I don’t feel like spending that on someone else’s property.

  Tuesday, 17 August

  Babs is engaged. An ecstatic letter to me, omitting to mention the young man’s name. We wonder, granny and I, if it’ll come to anything. As Gran put it, Babs is very ‘susceptible’ – i.e. she has had many boyfriends. And the West Indies, as someone else remarked, has a troubling climate.

  Friday, 3 September

  Babs’s fiancée is Roy Everett and works in Barclays Bank in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

  Phyllis is now in the new Rattigan play which opened in Liverpool last week.216 I met her old friend Estelle. She writes too, but gets nothing but rejections. I admire her perseverance immensely, take new heart from it. She has just had a children’s play for TV accepted – there seems a great opening here. But I should see more TV before I try, and how may I do that?

  Monday, 20 September

  Perhaps it’s the sweep of autumn in the wind and sky; perhaps it was E.D.’s frenzy this weekend, her wracked absorption in a Pyramid Party – an absurd, adventurous gamble for making easy money which has got hold of London, into which I might well have been drawn had my circumstances been a little different.

  Wednesday, 22 September

  Our miserable summer seems over. I have not once worn my nice nylon summer vests, but went into a semi-weight, which I am still wearing, with a skirt and cardigan set. The few some summer frocks I’ve worn hardly need washing before they are packed away.

  Monday, 22 November

  Caroline came back from Curtis Brown early in October. Hurst and Blackett have turned it down, and C.B. doesn’t think he can place it elsewhere. But after Harper’s rejection the edge was off the blow – it doesn’t seem to matter very much. Gus is reading it for me now.

  Am in touch, through an ad in Our Cats, with a woman in Dorset who was looking for a working partner with a car for various country enterprises, including the serious breeding of Siamese and small dogs. I like her letters extremely – but this idea of me removing myself and cats to Dorset and driving a car again seems so remote and impossible. I have got as far as arranging to meet the advertiser at the National Cat Club show on December 8. The choice will be: cats and country life among strangers, a really new start, or London, a job and all my old friends there, and maybe not more than two of the neutered cats as pets.

  Tuesday, 7 December

  I’m in a panic. Tomorrow I meet the woman from Dorset. Her letters have been friendly, encouraging, exciting, but I’m so convinced from them that she is another ‘difficult’ character. Perhaps it will all fall through – I’m now at the stage where I hope it will. She may not think me suitable, I may not like her, I may find her too overpowering. And after all I don’t know a thing about her past. She may have a criminal or a mental record. She has confessed to trouble in her own family: a mother of 82 who seems, shall we say, petulant.

  Monday, 3 Ja
nuary 1955

  Krishnamurti, the more one reads him, becomes more and more difficult to understand. I want to understand, to change myself. But if that motive wasn’t there – the divine discontent – I should not move a finger in K.’s direction. I wonder if there is not something immensely profound in the saying of an American who was so horrified when he read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.

  I must go back a month, to December 2nd, when I went with Lydia to see Harold Sharp. There was still red rock at the bottom of my auragraph.217 It had expanded, was thicker and heavier. This indicated drive and steadfastness, and being at bottom of the circle was good, giving ballast – at top it would have meant unbalance. A wash of green behind it, suggesting sea, meant adaptability. Violet colour was again predominant – this, said the guide, was the colour of rectifying or healing vitality and was very strong in me (the colour of nurses, psychologists, teachers). The circle on the left hand was edged thickly in blue. This indicates personality, but being on this side doesn’t mean egotism.

  He saw me writing small, short items. Short, short he kept saying – not a long book, but articles or stories. For the first time with a ‘seer’ of any kind (except, I think, in one graphology reading) did my writing tendency come to the surface. For this I am thankful: I cling to it, in the hope that it confirms that my passion for writing is not an illusion and that I shall be able to make a living by it. It has occurred to me since that the short items he saw me writing might be these journal entries.

  I take the wider interpretation, and on the strength of that intend to turn again to freelance work. There is more scope now – a bigger market. Correspondence schools abound, and though they may be catchpenny trick-wires, there must be some foundation for them. If some of their students didn’t succeed they wouldn’t keep going as they do. Anyway I’ve fallen again (sucker that I am), and have enrolled with the British American School of Successful Writing. The whole affair makes my academic layers writhe in agony, but this school guarantees legally (in large black type) to refund one’s fees if one hasn’t covered them by one’s earnings at the end of the course.

  I must record the touching concern of my accountant L.J.N. for my affairs. He knows, better than anyone, how alarmingly my capital is dwindling, and he took it upon himself to send me an ad he saw in The Times for a research assistant. He also invited me to lunch with him in the City last Friday. I am sure this interest arises from sheer kindness of heart, perhaps a little curiosity also, and nothing more.

  He is an odd little man. One doesn’t sort of ‘see’ him at all. He has no obvious personality, is grey, lives in a miasma of sums, and needs perhaps this personal contact with some of his clients to brighten his existence. I think he wished only to warn me of the dangers of ‘living on capital’, and may not have realised how acutely I was aware of them. ‘We are,’ he said as he parted, ‘the money doctors. We like to keep our patients in health.’

  And then my dear Peggy D. I stayed the night with her after meeting the Dorset woman. Peggy asked me if I wanted to ‘expand’ or ‘close in on myself’. I wish I’d had the courage to penetrate this further. Did she mean that I don’t give enough? To every one of my friends I give what I can, but with each individual, and there is no exception here, I withhold some part of myself. With Peggy it is much in my life that happened before I met her – all my sordid ineffectual love affairs. With Joan it is the Krishnamurti side, because I do not know how to put this across to her. N. may winkle some of it from me, but from her I have to withhold a great deal now, in self-defence, for the preservation of my integrity. To Lydia all my pre-war life is more or less a blank, the Gus and Malta periods, the Graham Howe influence. And with Gus, all that he doesn’t know about me doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t make the least difference to the warmth I feel when with him. He couldn’t care less about the love affairs and spiritual explorations – it is what I am at the moment, when we meet, that matters. So I could go on, through the whole list. And why should I think it in any way unusual that a woman of 45 cannot disclose the whole of herself to every friend?

  The Dorset woman, J.D., was certainly a ‘tough’ type: a very hard-headed business woman, frankly out to make as much money as she could by fair means or foul. She would have to be the boss in any partnership. It wouldn’t be easy working with her and I should have many moments of cowardice and submission for the sake of peace. But it wasn’t just this that deterred me. I woke in the night asking myself urgently why in the world I couldn’t make more effort with the articles, children’s stories, TV programmes and so on. To break away and settle in Dorset seemed monstrous, foolhardy. I wrote to J.D. saying that I feared I had not the funds to cover all that would be required of me. But she wrote again, very sympathetically, and has left the matter open. If in a few months’ time I feel differently about it. Which was generous (and flattering).

  Tuesday, 18 January

  On Sunday I found Pinnie on heat and arranged for her to be mated to Mrs Hughes’s stud in Cheam. Tonight Mrs H. phoned to say the affair has been happily concluded.

  Tuesday, 25 January

  I bought this horoscope in Woolworth this afternoon for 6d. and thought it would be amusing to start the new book with it in this first month of the new year.218

  Much more important is Elizabeth Myers’ book of Letters, borrowed from the public library. I am already twisted with admiration and envy. There she was in London, three years my junior, succeeding while I flumped and floundered and failed in jellyfish fashion at UCL.

  But I’m not writing this just for the luxury of a moan. It is in the hope that one day it may catch someone’s eye, someone who understands what happened and can prevent it happening to another youngster. I do feel that somehow in some way my life has been crippled psychologically – just as much as a child’s leg may be crushed and made useless by a careless car driver. I’m not trying to make excuses: I must do the best I can with my deformity, but if it’s possible to reach future generations by these pages, I hope they will understand more clearly than we have what psychological damage can be done in those early formative years. Damage beyond repair, if it’s not treated in time, through ignorance, neglect and carelessness. I do believe I had a chance to become a fairly successful writer long before I was 40, perhaps also to have made a happy marriage and had children, if someone (or people) had not left me by the roadside.

  I do not know when this ‘accident’ happened – perhaps before my mother’s death, though I think it was probably then, that sad October in the year 1923. My really miserable years began when I was 13, no, 14, and lasted until I went to UCL in 1930 (7 years). Oh, I’ve enjoyed my life all right since then, on the whole very much. I’ve had lots of fun, made marvellous good friends, had much interesting experience, learnt a great deal – but it seems now that it all came too late to help my growth. I don’t like to blame my father, stepmother and school teachers for this – it was not their fault so much as perhaps their ignorance. It is this ‘spiritual lack’ in our day and age. To refer to a recent correspondence in The Observer, we must learn the ‘knowledge of the heart’.

  Wednesday, 26 January

  At home what chance was there? After my mother died, nothing was read or discussed but the Daily Mail and novels by Ethel M. Dell and the Tarzan books.219 I was left to choose my own reading, but one needs someone to talk over one’s discoveries with. Musical standards did not aspire beyond the Grand Hotel Palm Court Orchestra. My brother sneered at Shaw though I doubt very much whether he had so much as seen one of Shaw’s plays. I’m not saying these standards were wrong or to be despised, but there are others.

  The trouble with me was, I think, that someone long ago made a sensitive, imaginative child feel insignificant and unwanted. Something touched the inferiority complex into life, and it grew and grew unchecked, unspotted, unhelped by any of the guides or teachers in my life who might have done something to right the balance. And so here I am at 45, without any definite occupation
, unmarried, rudderless, feeling homeless, not ‘safely nested down’ as I should be. Not that I want material security – I want something much bigger and more difficult to achieve.

  I am trying to give myself as an example and warning to all the parents and teachers of future generations. Do not jump to conclusions about them, however dearly you suppose you love them, however much they may exasperate or disappoint you. Learn to listen and know with the heart as well as the head. It doesn’t matter in the least whether your children are brilliant or famous or make a great worldly success of their lives: but it matters very much that they find the way of living creatively, out of their own true selves, however small or poorly paid their actual everyday job may seem. It is sad to think that those who need this advice most will heed it least. Ambition and power lust have such a hold on the human race.

  Thursday, 27 January

  I have this moment just come to and made a resolution. It is to write, for myself, an ‘Uncritical Study of Elizabeth Myers’ in special notebooks, with full quotations. There is nothing I should like better than to be the means of bringing Elizabeth Myers’s work to the notice of more people. The mind flies ahead too, with all the kudos and profit such an achievement might bring one in person, but this must be chastened. It must be written secretly, like these journals. Oh, I think this is a lovely idea!

  Saturday, 29 January

  I am living at the rate of £10 a week. This includes my one extravagance (cats) and my one vice (smoking), but together they don’t come to more than £3 a week. The rest of the money goes on food and the very small necessities of my tiny household. I never go to the pub, or buy any alcohol, eat very little cake or sweet things. My meals are of the simplest – little meat, no fish or very rarely. I must earn more.