A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  Wednesday, 2 August

  Discussing cheaper brands of cigarettes last week in tobacconists, I said I’d resort to Woodbines. ‘And where will you go from there at the next increase in price?’ asked a traveller.

  On Saturday, obliging villager S.P., who was providing the transport to Cat Show for me, called me Miss Bray. ‘Miss P., please,’ I corrected him, adding, ‘Ever since I took over her shop (the original Little B.) there’s been this confusion.’

  ‘It’s only that,’ he said kindly, ‘you both wear glasses, have something of the same look, and are about the same age.’

  This absolutely stunned me for about 10 minutes. Miss B. started receiving her old age pension last year. My answer should have been sharp and instantaneous: ‘Good grief! She is 15 years older than I am!’ Not quite accurate, but near enough to check grossly inaccurate village speculation about me. Oh, I can’t possibly look that old! To be thought to be anything like Miss B. is so deeply humiliating.

  Monday, 21 August

  What saddens me is that the ‘sparkle and life’ Ralph L. said he found in my last two paintings (before the whole class, at the end-of-term review of our work last month), and which I know to be there in me, is so often swamped, obliterated, in the wrong atmosphere. With my family I seem always to become dull, fearful: it is so rude to them.

  Wednesday, 11 October

  ‘I just love painting.’ Yes I do. And it seems to be bringing about astonishing results, though I doubt it is wise to record this. I did three or four more pictures on my own during the holidays – two of cats, a still life, a little flower piece – and the few people who have seen them so far seem genuinely impressed. I am encouraged to go on, to work at it, not simply dabble to satisfy my vanity. It is the stillness that counts, the silence, the absence of nagging at oneself.

  I am not trying to compete, I really have no ambitions about it. Am discovering through trial and error, not minding the errors, but here is a point: what I find I can do I seem able to do quite well. It is encouragement received from others that fills me with warmth and makes it seem worthwhile. (A small group of local amateurs meet every Monday evening at Farnham Royal Village Hall and just paint without instruction. They are a nice little group – there’s a feeling of expansion when working with others.) Ralph L. hasn’t seen my ‘homework’ yet, though I long for him to do so. I need his judgement. Oh my God he is growing a beard, and seems younger to me than ever.

  I am glad I have ‘given up’ writing.

  The deepest humiliation I suffer is in trying to answer the question (which I am always being asked or see in people’s eyes) ‘Why haven’t you married?’ The only true answer, in my heart, is ‘Because no one has ever asked me.’ I shall never be able to bring myself to say this. I don’t think it is entirely my fault.

  Thursday, 9 November

  I seem to have come to a dead end with Ralph L. Every Thursday it is the same. I come home disturbed, disappointed, and there start all the fascinating conversations I want to have with him and never do. His wife turns up at the end of the evening. I was introduced a few weeks ago, not I think deliberately, but because I happened to be almost on top of her. My spies report that ‘she doesn’t understand him’ but I thought her rather nice, a good balance to his vagueness, solid where he is ephemeral.

  Sheila Hiron returns to work at the Little B. next week, another miracle. I have a great affection for Mrs J., but as one of my staff she was beginning to drive me up the wall. After six years or so of faithful attendance you’d think she’d remember something of the work, but the mistakes she continued to make were quite incredible. Now I shall have two excellent helpers: Sheila onto the secondhand books, K.F. does practically all the library work. We have been improving slowly and steadily. I think we can do better yet.

  Thursday, 8 February 1962

  I am drawn to this journal only because I have a feeling I want to tidy it up. Its purpose is over, finished. The pattern of my life seems set. Day-to-day work at the bookshop, which I love, and am still managing to keep my head above the financial waters. Parish Council work six times a year. Wee and the cats as my home background, painting and gardening and the social round to fill whatever leisure time I may have. Family connections seem to be expanding too. I hear from Babs that Roy wants to buy a house in Bucks. I might then seriously, with Pooh’s help (moral not financial), get a car. And so it goes on, unfolding and unfolding, sheer delight.246

  Friday, 21 September

  ‘There was light in the sky when I woke up. Sylvia was asleep, her arm under my neck. The light grew, and I lay for a long time … then Sylvia’s free arm came up over the bedclothes …’

  From I Met A Lady, Howard Spring. Oh my gawd! The moment I wake I always want to pee, but they never seem to in books.

  ‘What a woman!’ Jean and Nockie in full bloom, 1960s.

  46.

  Gloss and Plastic and What Have You

  Wednesday, 9 January 1963 (aged fifty-three)247

  The worst winter for 82 years. For 10 days I couldn’t move Freddie. Spent most of the morning digging him clear and making a track, and finally got him to Slough. Miss D. skidded into a tree. A cruel and beautiful world of wonders, terror, pain and delight.

  Friday, 2 February

  This winter will pass and we shall forget the details. We shall say, ‘It was so cold and went on for so long … there were electricity power cuts … transport difficulties … fuel shortages and delays … the usual burst pipes, illnesses, deaths …’

  We’ve been without water at the shop for nearly a month. All the trees were etched heavily in feathery white, a clear frost of exceptional density. I haven’t been to the painting group on Monday evenings. The weather has taken the heart out of one’s enthusiasms.

  Sunday, 10 February

  It is bliss now to be relaxing after tea in sitting room, buried by cats and cushions. How thankful I am for the plastic cover bought as part of Pooh’s Xmas present for Freddie, tiresome as it is to get on and off and keep tied down. With engine covered by old dust sheet and an oil lamp inside the bonnet, the little car is well protected and is not at all reluctant to start when unwrapped.

  I must remember that many other people are much worse off and have suffered terribly this winter. In remote country places, old couples have been found snowbound without fuel or food. People have been caught in drifts in their cars and died. Farmers have been having the most appalling difficulties and what animals have been through one daren’t contemplate.

  Tuesday, 12 February

  Relax, relax, forget the undone things, the semi-frozen slush, the shrouded woods, the tiresome old women: ‘Not my sort of book at all, dear. Complete waste of time, couldn’t you allow me something on it?’ Sixpence she had paid to borrow it over the weekend. And, ‘I heard a book reviewed, can’t remember the title, it was about children or something, I think the author was Mary Smith or it may have been Brown, quite an old book they said but I should like to read it, No, I don’t want to buy it …’

  Mrs A. is small, with plump little appealing face, comes dressed in sealskin coat, ‘I shan’t survive this winter, I just shan’t survive, bury me quietly.’ We discovered that we both like salads and can eat them all year round.

  I had hopes, ten days ago, that I had found someone to replace Mrs D. the cleaner. She came and looked, as it seemed to me, in stunned silence about the place, slapped around for an hour and fled. I heard indirectly that she has an allergy for cats, but I am left with the feeling that she was so shocked by the shabbiness and poor equipment at Wee that she could not face it, and this has filled me with rage, despair and contempt. Wee can be made to gleam and sparkle and glow. It is not a slum. Young women nowadays just don’t know what real housework means. They have highly efficient vacuum cleaners and electric polishers. Their beastly little kitchens are all so well fitted and finished in gloss and plastic and what have you, they don’t have to contend with old fireplaces and old oil stoves, old stone flo
ors that wear out one’s lino, ill-fitting doors and outside lavatories. They have kitchen cupboards, larder, refrig and washing machines. Well I don’t care. Snobs.

  Wednesday, 7 June

  Aunt Maggie died about three weeks ago. My last link with the Homefield days. I’ll never go over to that bungalow at Little Chalfont again. Every room, every bit of furniture was so familiar, so much part of my background, and now it is finished, like a shutter suddenly clamped down. I have no part even in its dissolution: I knew her intimately, but none of her relatives sufficiently to be drawn into the winding up of her affairs. I doubt I shall ever know what is being done with her things. There are books which I have given to her and Ethel which I should have liked. Not very important really, it is only that once more I am shocked by the silence which follows death.

  An American yesterday bought over £9-worth of art books and has ordered 5 or 6 more @ 35 shillings and 2 @ 42 shillings. I do love Americans.

  Sunday, 25 August

  Lydia has now bought herself one of the small new Wolseys. Smashing. On an overdraft, against the deeds for her house in Upton Park. And why not, indeed, if it makes her as happy as it seems to. Freddie’s trouble now is body rust. I wish Peter or someone had warned me of this last autumn. I am treating the worst patches with Jenolite and car paint.248

  Mr E.B., for whom I collect Bucks material for the history he has been compiling this last 10 years or more, breezes in. ‘What a nice little shop! I always say,’ (as he always does) ‘that a place without a bookshop is a place without a soul. You give the place a soul.’

  Monday, 2 March 1963

  The cats are my great love, and through them must therefore come the great griefs. Suzie was born last September, a delectable blue-cream with white splodges. One night early in November I had drawn a bath of unprecedented heat, as near boiling as it has ever been. I was in a dazed and with-fatigue phase, but that is no excuse. There is no excuse for me – that is the terrible, unbearable point of the tragedy. I had pushed chairs from the bath edge, but Suzie and her brother were an active two-months. I should have known the danger of leaving them with the bath flap up. I went outside for less than two minutes, heard cries but thought it was adults squabbling, which they often do, and returned to find Suzie swimming desperately. I can’t bear it, please God forgive my completely unforgivable carelessness. No, I cannot be forgiven – what I want is that ten minutes back again. She must have been struggling in that scalding water for a full 60 seconds.

  She screamed for an hour and a half afterwards. I dried her, warmed her, poured on olive oil. It was a miracle that she survived the shock as she did, and was one reason why in all these laborious, patient and determined months since I hoped to pull her through. Twice at the clinic they urged me to have her put to sleep but I could not give in. The burns were frightful, paws, legs and the whole of her undercarriage. I realised the tail would have to be amputated. The vet came to the conclusion last week – so pleased he seemed, and so confident of success – that he could operate and do some plastic surgery on the back muscles. He operated this morning, but my darling succumbed to ‘operation shock’. It is over, over.

  I was so sure she would come back and charm us and enjoy her little life at Wee. Was it really necessary to have operated now? Could we have waited? What I feel, fear, is that it was a betrayal. I was keeping that kitten alive with my love – away from this contact she was bewildered, frightened. The clinic surroundings are, well, clinical. If the operation could have been done on my lap … Stupid, you say, well yes, but think of the trust she had in me. How can I explain? We live in too cruel, too insensitive an age. Science, science, but no understanding of love.

  Wednesday, 4 March

  I went to the art class this morning, lunched in Slough, shopped at Sainsbury’s, called at Cats Protection League. I have asked them to find another kitten for me (mad, all cat-addicts are mad), a blue-cream if possible. This is not just a selfish replacement urge, but I hope will save another life.

  Easter Sunday, 29 March

  The little grey ghost still lingers, can still reduce me to anguish and tears, but life pushes one on remorselessly, and the pain lessens. Or, the intervals between the memories which bring the pain lengthen. To stifle it, I have been playing patience at the time I usually spent attending to Suzie. It’s an occupation I despise and feel no better for, just another sort of drug.

  Saturday, 27 June

  Shop garden is yielding strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, spinach, roses, pinks. I could not give all this up. Developers are after the whole block, have already swallowed old grocer Spong, and are tempting my neighbours. No amount of money seems to me worth being dispossessed of my freehold, uprooted, broken.

  It may not be easy to maintain refusal. I have to face, sooner or later, the county’s road-widening scheme. This, some people think, may give the developers a lever with the Planning Authority for compulsory purchase of obstinate land blocks. I couldn’t have better legal advice and backing, but I still feel small, vulnerable and frightened, a pebble in the way of a tidal wave.

  Thursday, 2 July

  There’s a nice woman comes sometimes into the shop. I don’t know her name. She buys with discrimination, usually Penguins, and told me she was at Oxford. I remembered her tonight as I began on H.E. Bates’s new collection of short stories The Fabulous Mrs V. After she had wandered around for a little, she asked me, ‘Do you write?’

  I said, with some hesitation, no. And she left it at that. No, I do not write. I am not even painting very much these days. There never seems to be enough time.

  Ralph L. leaves us this term. It was bound to happen. There again I have failed utterly, but probably because I wanted the impossible. We have never got beyond the most frivolous of exchanges. A gulf too wide, too deep, unbridgeable. Yet I feel I should have been able to bridge it.

  My Mrs D. has come back. After 18 months of battling with housework on my own I ran into her one morning in Slough. She volunteered to give me a morning a week, as before. This is such sheer bliss I can hardly believe it is true. Also, I have had the phone put on again at Wee – a party line with neighbours.

  Wednesday, 12 August

  Mrs D. survived three weeks.

  Last week I closed the shop and spent the week at leisure – seeing Lydia, a night at [hairdresser] Surge’s entrancing top-floor flat overlooking Clapham Common, Mitchell family to tea, gardening. Incidentally, saw the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night. They are amazing.

  The threat to Florence Cottages has not been lifted, but R.P. has been whipping me into a state of confidence.249 Most of the men with whom I’ve discussed the problem urge me to consider the advantages of accepting a good offer: ‘You could be made comfortable for life’. But I do not want that sort of comfort. R.P. says, ‘You have a valuable little property, a good little business, you’ll never get another freehold in Farnham Common like it. A Compulsory Purchase Order will require the Minister’s consent. If he grants it we shall then appeal and this will mean a Public Inquiry. The council will look very foolish, and they won’t want to risk that. You are perfectly safe – it’s a cinch.’

  It is a battle for the ‘small man’. He is being bullied and crushed out of existence by the greed of the powerful. Their influence is so insidious that practically every man in business has his outlook distorted by it. Nothing but money seems to matter.

  Thursday, 4 February, 1965

  Village development plans are halted. First, probably, because Labour was returned in October, and since then on account of the county’s new road proposals. They threaten a huge widening all along the route from Slough to Beaconsfield, with dual carriageway to link a new M road at our North with the M4.250 But there has already been so much public protest from local residents – it would destroy the village utterly – that the county authority is reported as seeking a diversion. We are not out of this wood yet.

  Saturday, 6 February

  This time last week we were a
ll rather under the pall of Churchill’s funeral. I saw some of it on TV and was immensely impressed. But the general depression was heavy, I could not escape it all day, or the next when I crawled into village to collect Sunday newspapers. Several personalities have passed recently – T.S. Eliot and Dame Edith Sitwell – but none has made the impact on the nation that Churchill did.

  When tired I do get so fractious, grinding my teeth, wanting to destroy – impatient and full of bile. It’s the pressure of the age, all such huge ghastly haste, so much to do and never enough time.

  August 1965

  Wee boasts a larder and I have another car. These are the season’s big events. The larder, planned for years, materialised in March and was followed by an orgy of redecorating and clearing. Car is a 1954 Anglia and an astounding bargain, available at my garage just as Freddie cracked up in May. I’ll never know such joy as when we were trying out the Anglia and discovered how easy it was to drive. Freddie’s bodywork gave way, literally falling apart. The wiring too was in a dreadful state; I had been able to use the fog lamp only.

  Sunday, 6 March 1966

  This is being a year of trouble and tragedy. I had recovered from flu setback when disaster struck the shop with a thump. Just over a month ago, in the early hours of a Thursday morning, the Aladdin heater started to smoke. It must have smoked at least half the night. The shop was thick with heavy black soot everywhere, right through to kitchen at the back. It was terrible, an absolute and most ghastly nightmare. Kay opened that morning and nearly fainted on the spot. It was hard to believe so innocent a thing as an oil stove could cause so much damage.

  I phoned the insurance company immediately, but I think they thought I was being hysterical. It took over three weeks of intense hard work to clean through the premises. It was a snow storm in soot, a fungus on all exposed surfaces, a drift of black scum into every cupboard and drawer. Every single item of stock has had to be gone over – books, greeting cards, wrapping paper, drawing paper, every book has had to have its jacket removed, pages flipped through. At least two-thirds of the stock has had to be discarded. My claim is for £300.