A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  Tonight I make time for it. Events are taking such an unexpected aspect I must. I fret and fume and pray for capital – a football pool win, a prize, an undreamt-of legacy or surprising rich lover, anything of this nature to help me finance my little business. And out of the blue descends Lady B. A month ago I didn’t know of her existence, but this was my fault, my ignorance of the powers that rule the Trading Estate.

  She is wealthy, influential, forceful, of heavy build with a slow, powerful kind of vitality. Her husband is in his 80s and potters about the village with push-stick shopping basket. He came in about three weeks ago to ask if I could get rid of some old books for him – he asked me to have tea with him and see them. He makes delicious wholemeal bread and promised me a loaf. And of course during polite conversation I said I much wanted a larger shop: I’d heard some time ago that tobacconist’s Allan’s was on the market, but was quite beyond my means. And Lady B. said, ‘Find out more about it – I might go in with you.’

  The possibilities here are endless, complications fearful. Lady B. is set on making the basis of the business newspapers and magazines – bookselling alone isn’t enough. A good newsagent’s, plus books, library and cigarettes might well flourish. I, however, am not going to be up at the crack of dawn to organise a dozen or so maddening little boys.

  Sunday, 6 May

  And now it has all frothed into nothing. Allan’s went long ago. Lady B., having gone into figures, decided that the project was too expensive, the returns would be too uncertain. I have struggled on, just paying my way but no more, not a penny profit yet for me and my resources dwindle, dwindle. A local trader suggests that I approach some other, established, bookshop in the locality and ask them if they would be interested in opening a branch here. Make your own position safe, don’t risk more capital, let someone else be your boss. As the book trade is at present I doubt very much whether any other bookseller – short of a firm such as W.H. Smith – could possibly undertake expansion. It is all so humiliating.

  Aunt Jessie Holford died in January and has left me £200. I have had to break into my last £1,000 of war stock, and have £700 left on paper, worth actually at present less than £500. This is what the credit squeeze, inflation, universal greed and fear does for one. Thank you, Aunt Jessie, whom I never went to see, for remembering me. It is a greater gift than you know.

  Thursday, 14 June

  Old Mrs W., as always in straight-cut dark brown coat and Henry Heath hat, came in the other day saying, ‘This is the first time you have disappointed me. Filth!’ And she flung Sylvia Townsend Warner’s new collection of stories Winter in the Air on my desk. ‘Filth!’ I must have looked startled, for she added, ‘I hope the author is not a friend of yours?’227

  I should have known better than to suggest this book for her. I am enjoying it immensely, but not because I find it filthy. I discovered S.T.W. a little while ago, and my judgement seems for once sound. I am glad of this, that I can recognise a writer of quality.

  One must not dwell on the things people say that cause irritation. You are tired out, then anything anyone may say can inflame you and inflame old wounds. At that point, when you begin to find yourself on edge, bristling with resentment, let go. At what seems the ‘nervous breakdown’ stage, unable or unwilling to let go because you are sure your world will drop to pieces if you do – that is exactly the moment when you can let go. And when you do, the pleasant aspect of living returns. You discover or rediscover the pleasure of living in the immediate present. Which is always right. The eternal moment Now.

  Wednesday, 27 June

  I’ve decided all of a sudden that lino is the answer to the floor problem.

  Tuesday, 3 July

  Nurseryman S., deploring the lack of good writers today, stirred my sense of responsibility as the village’s book supplier.228 For him and one or two like him it is in my power to provide the new and better authors I read of. The sad truth is, so few people are interested. One tends to get lazy about it – as sapped and woolly as one’s customers. They don’t like what they call ‘horrors’ (I don’t mean murder whodunnits). Nothing different or difficult or painful, nothing to disturb their illusions. Colin Wilson has pointed out that ‘the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort.’ Must try to get hold of his book The Outsider.229 Also Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

  Friday, 13 July

  A gypsy with basket of lace nipped into the shop this morning and wheedled 25 shillings out of me. I could burst into anger at myself. She sold me 5 shillings’ worth of lace that I do not want, then read my fortune in the crystal for £1. She told me nothing that I hoped to hear. They never do – why do I always let myself be exploited, made a fool of? Now I must pay, not only in cash, but in deep mental humiliation.

  She was emphatic that I should be selling the business, and be married by the New Year and go abroad. I was to marry and settle down and be happy in a little house with no stairs.

  If I am to meet a man who wants to marry me, well let that be so, I’ll deal with this situation to the best of my ability when it arises. But as the reader must surely realise by now, there is not the merest whisper or smell of such a person on my horizon. Why do they never see the really important influences in my life – Wee, the cats, my desire and efforts to write, my love of literature, my search for something ‘higher’? My urge to be married, to be ‘Mrs’, has died, truly that is so – it does not seem to matter in the least now, with a business to build. I love what I have, the life I am living. I no longer waste my energy on ghostly lovers or wishing I were someone different. If that sounds smug, it is not. There are enough difficulties, anxieties and hurts in my present to keep me from becoming smug – I only mean that I am learning to accept what I am.

  Sunday, 15 July

  Lydia phoned at 8 p.m. yesterday and swept me off to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the first film I have seen for ages, a diverting, stimulating musical trifle of backwoodsmen in America, with some marvellously disciplined and agile dancing in it. I think she had had a row with husband Don and wanted to get away from him for the evening.

  Sunday, 29 July

  Sitting room is pale eau de nil green with white paint on ceiling, perfect background for dark oak, coloured books, old coloured cushions. The bath in kitchen has been boarded in at last. Kitchen walls are still cream, window and sill pale green, curtains dyed rust, the storeroom is white with a green door, green handles on doors, green medicine cupboard, green telephone shelves, broken walls mended with cement.

  Tuesday, 18 December

  Pooh and Ivy have been on leave since September. Babs and Roy arrived in October and sailed for Jamaica today. I am to become a great aunt in April/May. Pooh has finished his service with Cable & Wireless and intends to settle in Jamaica. We spend Xmas day together with Ethel and Aunt Maggie – he has been saving the petrol for it.230

  Babs is very distant. I cannot reach her at all. She and Roy stayed with me a fortnight. Him I like exceedingly, a lanky normal healthy young man with nice sense of humour and devoted to Babs. Perhaps there is too much of the Pratt/Lucey reserve in her for me ever to know her better – I feel all the time repulsed, just as I must have repulsed many people when I was that age. I suffered for it, but she can escape into doting affection of her husband, sanctuary of her own home and coming child.

  Joey is lost. My dearly beloved philosopher Joe. I have not seen him for nearly a fortnight. What happened, my little love? Did car lights one dark evening dazzle you? Did a fox surprise you? Or did you find more loving, patient friends and wander away with them?

  I mentioned two books on 3 July, The Outsider and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Angus Wilson’s highly praised work was disappointing. I got through it, but was limping towards the end. I saw for a moment clearly, exactly, the homosexual as described to me by Graham Howe. Only a homo could have written it – brilliant,
perceptive, but disintegrated, all his characters were separate, striving for separateness and isolation, afraid of real relationships. And what a phobia he has for the colour mauve.231

  Thursday, 27 December

  Christmas all over now. Sadness and silence fall.

  Pooh and Ivy spent Xmas Day very pleasantly en famille with Ethel and Aunt Maggie – huge meals, fires, welcome. Yesterday afternoon was spent with Pooh and Ivy at Richmond playing Scrabble, then by train to stay with Joan at Golders Green, and today on my way home have called in to see Gus. Phyllis is with Separate Tables in New York – both hate the separation. He is haggard with various stresses and strains in her absence, but charming, charming as always.

  Why am I not happy, content, at peace, as I should be? I didn’t want hectic gaiety and noisy parties, I didn’t want romance, glamour, excitement. I wanted no more than I actually had. We are losing touch in some way, through circumstances that have got out of our control. We have to break away and learn to understand loneliness – the loneliness that each individual must know and not try to avoid … we’ve left youth and its exuberance behind. We are sober, respectable, middle-aged – but not from morality or pride, simply from the pressure and edge of the times. All of us, one way or another, struggling against financial worries, fatigue, anxiety about families or elderly relatives. There is no security for us, not even the false security of fixed adequate incomes and capital.

  It was laughter I sought, a catharsis of laughter as we had in the Gus ‘harem’ days, wonderful sensation of lightness and ease out of nonsense. No, it doesn’t happen anymore. It is depressing, longing for the drink that satisfied one in youth.

  Monday, 7 January 1957

  A little concentrated grief, then it will be over. I’ve said goodbye to Pooh. Dear Pooh, whom I love dearly, God bless, keep and prosper you. We went this morning to the agents at Wembley to discuss Homefield; shall probably sell it when the time is opportune. And we stood for a few minutes outside the old house like ghosts. I dream of it often, but it is never quite in my dreams as it is actually. The district has changed so much. The buttercups and cow parsley, owls in the oaks, that small unmade gravelly road where tramps lurked, the still summer evenings, Pooh cycling before breakfast in the holidays, the Burlington sweetshop where I spent my Saturday pennies, all echoing, miraged faintly in the dim winter morning – goodbye goodbye! It is over, over long ago. We cannot go back.

  Yet I cannot let go quite so abruptly. Our father built that house more than 50 years ago, full of bright hopes, establishing a home for him and his family, expecting the place to take root and grow, be a centre for grandchildren and great grandchildren. I feel that something is lost, that somehow we have bungled things. I don’t mean just our small family, but ours multiplied, the whole generation that has rushed into being and made Wembley into such an outrageously sordid suburb. All the Wembleys that have tramped down the buttercups …

  45.

  Terminex

  Tuesday, 20 August 1957 (aged forty-seven)

  This is an instrument, not an indulgence or means of escape, not a discipline nor an end, nor an attempt to embalm the passing moment. It shall be a clearing house, a sifting ground.

  Really, what bliss to sit here again writing this. It makes me feel better at once. About this time every month I get fearfully depressed. It is the time when I have to make up my accounts and pay as many bills as I can. I must face it: more money goes out than comes in. One feels hemmed in by rapacious beasts, always roaring, demanding their pounds and pounds of flesh. They all seem so much more powerful and better fed than I am. They couldn’t care less that they are draining my resources. I get panicky. I think I can’t go on, I must give up this silly losing battle, find a more safe, well-paid job before disaster quite overwhelms me. Why do I bother? What am I living for? All the old torments return.

  I meant to do the ironing. I must go and mince the cats’ supper.

  Sunday, 25 August

  I had £5,000 when I was 21, and now I have only £500 of it left. It has helped me do quite a lot of pleasant things, but I don’t desperately want it all back again. I think it’s such a false idea to suppose that if you had that amount or other fat sum that everything in the garden will be lovely.

  My neighbour Lady Spicer died about five weeks ago, quite unexpectedly, one quiet Tuesday afternoon. She had been longing to die, for months and months, it must have been a great relief for her. She was a miserable old devil in many ways, cantankerous and selfish, but she was elegant, had lovely things and a nice sense of humour. I had grown very fond of her, though dreading always any reference to politics and current affairs. We were always, according to her, on the brink of war, and it was always Russia’s fault. She would lie in that delicious bedroom against snow-white pillows, in delicate pale pink bedwear, plucking at the silk eiderdown and murmur, ‘Isn’t the world in a mess! What a mess we’re in …’

  I found her pearls one day this summer. They were lying in the grass on the triangle in front of our houses, where I cut across on my bicycle daily. I didn’t know they were hers when I picked them up, but it dawned on me slowly that they were unusually handsome – in fact they were alive, they glowed. They became more and more beautiful as I looked and handled them.

  She was so grateful to have them restored that she gave me a cheque for £5. It was during one of the periods when she felt well enough to get up and walk outside a little in the afternoon. She always wore her pearls, but her hands shook so much she had not been able to fasten the safety catch.

  It was a thrill to have held a small fortune in my hands. They are being sold, I’m told: her heirs don’t want them. Her heirs don’t want her charming house either. We all wonder apprehensively who our new neighbours will be. I do miss her. I have known no other neighbour that side all the time I’ve been here – 18 years.232

  New Year’s Day, 1958

  Two resolutions:

  8.

  To remove sign saying ‘Agent For Foyles Library’ outside the Little B. This has been achieved, and fills me with relief. I am sick unto death of being thought part of that hugely untidy concern. ‘Foyles would get it for you, wouldn’t they – you’re an Agent. They have everything, surely.’ Such is the power of advertising.

  9.

  To keep this again as diary. But the resolve weakens already – frustrated by overwhelming urge to make up for lost sleep, having seen the New Year in until 2 a.m. at Lydia’s.

  Saturday, 18 January

  Today has been a typically busy one, so I’ll inflict it on you in detail. I do not drag myself from bed until after 8. BBC News is already half over as I plug in my electric kettle. By nine I have fed and smoked and dressed, but have left the bedroom and breakfast things. Off I go in my shabby winter coat and head scarf on my bicycle through the dull, cold January morning. Must stop at baker’s to collect bread, at PO to post parcel and buy stamps, at Lund’s to order greengroceries for today’s delivery, at Foley’s to buy cheese and other oddments. Then to tobacconist’s for the daily drug and to collect my mail. And so at last to open up the Little B.

  It is after 9.30. I have to put out the mat, the ‘1s. 6d.’ tray, turn on the electric stove. A letter from Grig – what joy! And another cat book order with blessed postal orders for £1 16s. Things do not get really hectic until after 11 a.m. I have my milk and biscuits in comparative peace, reading The Bookseller. Then everyone comes all at once, and I hardly pause until 12.30. Many weekend library customers, children for small items, a man buys one of the Don Camillos.233

  Home. Open up the kitchen fire, put on the soup, dash upstairs and make the bed, empty the slop pail, clear up the breakfast tray, make the afternoon’s thermos of tea, sit down to soup and egg and cheese, bread, honey and a banana. Comb hair, smear on more lipstick, must buy some more stamps, get more cigarettes and a Crunchie for my tea.

  Must finish off the week’s Clique.234 Harrods’ van with the week’s library exchange arrives about 2.30 – I ge
t these books checked in and sorted. A new man joins the library. Library, constant planning and organisation and niggling detail, constant watching of book reviews, tracing books people ask for and keeping customers satisfied, keeping records up to date, mail, letters to be answered, publishers tackled, orders sent.235

  Just before 5 I go across to the Ladies at The Feathers. Yesterday’s headache still threatens at the back of my eyes. At 5.30 I go out again to buy in the weekend’s cigarettes and some greens from Mrs Ford. We gossip mainly about the coal situation. I am quite out of coke and burning the dregs of slack in the kitchen fire. The coal merchant can promise nothing. I feel tempted to burgle my late neighbour’s store.

  I buy a 3d. ice cream and eat this while I balance the day’s takings, which I make 1s. short. Bring in the book tray, padlock the cases, stove off, lock up. Back lamp won’t go on, must cycle home without. A light darkness tonight, not unpleasant. Home again – little shadows in the dark garden emerge. A warm, enticing meal all ready for me? No, of course not.

  Here is a surprise for you. This autumn I was appointed Clerk to the Parish Council. Am very glad of the extra money. (The job has to be learned slowly, item by item – all the Councillors and late clerk are being very helpful and tolerant.)

  So it goes, dear reader, day after day much like this one, until I can stand it no more and go to bed early with hot milk and a couple of Veganin tablets. Most people haven’t a clue of the work I have to get through. ‘You wouldn’t think it, would you, with a little business like that …’

  But it is beginning to pay, just a little.

  Tuesday, 21 January

  I feel tonight as must people of the frozen North when they see the first signs of the winter’s ice breaking. The Scheme may fruit. We have waited so long, bound in for nearly three years by ice I couldn’t thaw.