A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  There is one muzzy resolution coming up for the New Year. As it seems that I am in truth to become the owner of Wee, may I not become withdrawn and selfish because of it – retire here from the world and this terrifying age of ‘speed and greed’ – but give out, give out, share all that I have and can to the tormented and eager young. I mean that when forced to retire, as I may be, may I be able and guided to do something useful with what remains of my life. Not just shrivel and grow old.

  ‘I must go and mince the cats’ supper.’

  Jean and her protectors at Wee Cottage, probably 1960s.

  47.

  Slough of Despond

  Sunday, 14 February, 1971 (aged sixty-one)

  Dockers, dustmen, electricians and now postmen for the last month have been bedevilling the country. Consequently nearly 40 publisher’s accounts are in limbo. Wee negotiations are held up too. Mail order business is at a complete standstill, daily takings down perilously. (I heard yesterday that Blackwell’s of Oxford have been losing £200,000 a week.) General sympathy seems to be with the postmen.

  It has been a wonderful rest. Nothing in the post, nothing to bring the usual daily train of fret and frenzy. If only I could go on living at this more leisurely pace – but one cannot afford it.

  As I was parking the car this morning, a whacking big saloon car (I never know the make) drew up beside me, and a slick young man with longish hair, smoking at the wheel, leaned out and asked if I could tell him the value of any of the properties around here, pointing to my neighbour’s house. ‘Thinking of buying,’ he said in a lordly way. He looked about 18. The girl at his side, not much older, pale, fair, detached and a little apologetically amused. What an extraordinary request. I would never divulge values of adjacent properties to callow strangers, even if I knew the value. What on earth were they up to, that with-it and brash young couple?

  D-Day, Monday, 15 February255

  First customer wanted paperbacks. They came to (14s.) 70p. That was easy. During another transaction, when I was valiantly adding up decimal value of several greetings cards, customer added wrapping paper at last moment, and I just stopped myself adding another 8p instead of 3-and-a-half p to the total. At tobacconists-sweets-newsagents The Bon Bon, Mrs Bon Bon was doggedly taking and giving new money at her till on one side of the shop, while on the other veteran Mrs H. (who at 70 years or so still has a newspaper round in the mornings) said, ‘I’m not doing that money!’ and firmly gave me 2s. 10d. change for 50p.

  Peter M. popped in just before closing time. He reported chaos at one large factory he visited today, where authority had changed all the tea machines over the weekend to take new coinage, but employees this morning had none, and queues formed outside accounts dept for change.

  Monday, 8 March

  The post strike is over. The Government has won. ‘We are not defeated!’ cry the postmen. January mail is delivered. Bills will pour in, money will pour out. No more rest, no more ease. Day that I loved, the night is here.

  Tuesday, 9 March

  Local Dr Barnardo’s group is giving a lunch tomorrow. Tickets @ £1 a time via the Little Bookshop (because of postal strike). A fashion show is thrown in and the whole affair is being held at a private house. The committee organises and cooks lunch for what apparently will be well over 130 people. About 50lbs of deep frozen fresh salmon is being dealt with today in someone’s oven. Salad is bought I think from a ‘Cash & Carry’. I record this because Left Wing intellectuals tend to sneer at this sort of activity. I wonder why, and if they have tried to do anything similar themselves to help the community.

  Friday, 28 May

  Wee. The conveyance came through only last week. Today final arrangements for loan were made with the bank, and I handed cheque for purchase money to solicitors. I felt like a millionaire and have been promised a further few hundred to help with the badly needed improvements I have in mind. Thank you God, here is one prayer answered.

  Sunday, 4 July

  Last evening, Peggy Denny took me to the new Chinese Restaurant in the village and we sat drinking coffee upon coffee after the lush meal. P. is a dear, large, ugly woman, and such a snob – I can’t understand why I like her as I do. I am ashamed later. She has a very good job with British Aluminium and lives alone comfortably in the house left her by her parents. She is large and clever and comfortably off and respectable and has not a wisp of imagination, but a huge sense of humour breaks through the dust and makes her more than tolerable.

  Monday, 6 September

  Wholesalers seemed to have abandoned me, but they both arrived today with usual sort of excuses, van breakdowns, new schedules etc. I forgive them as I now have new stock (needed at least three weeks ago) and have spent greater part of the day sorting and rearranging and putting on a new window display. It is a good feeling – something to offer people, Come Buy, Come Buy.

  ‘A place without a bookshop is a place without a soul.’

  Jean drums up business in Our Cats magazine.

  Tuesday, 28 December

  I now have the great comfort of an enclosed loo and a little greenhouse against the kitchen. No more paddling out on cold wet nights and mornings. And new French windows in the sitting room.

  Thursday, 3 February 1972

  Ghastly things are happening in Ireland. I begin to feel drawn towards a growing feeling in this country that we withdraw our troops and leave the Irish to fight it out amongst themselves. IRA snipers appear to be everywhere, and any youth who can make and throw a bomb can do so at any time through his own initiative. Violence bubbles up in me when I hear these things. I know in my heart that we must get rid of this feeling of violence in oneself, one must not feel exasperated and impatient.

  Must feed the cats. Have not recorded yet that three more have gone. Modest Wendy lost weight, went off her food and died within it seemed a few days – kidney disease again. Monty, my beautiful marmalade, went the same way a few months later. And just before Xmas my beloved Roger, so loving, talkative and altogether dear, disappeared on Sunday evening. It was the Olympic Cat Show weekend (such a big success too!). Weather was mild, and I found all the cats safe and well on my return, Roger indignant at his captivity and eager for garden air. And evil young tom was on the prowl. We were plagued by him for months last year. He was in fact a cat with no fear of the human race whatsoever, and would always try to seduce me. His intention was clear – he wanted to come in and dominate the cottage. More than once I rescued Roger from a cowering position in the bushes. But this Sunday evening he did not come back. He was not there in the morning, nor all day Tuesday. Just after Xmas I met neighbour Mrs B. Had I lost a cat? A friend of hers had seen ‘that beastly tom eating a black and white cat’ near our cottages.

  If only I hadn’t turned him out.

  Wednesday, 15 February

  Last Wednesday I had another interview (the third) with spirit healer Dr Lang at Aylesbury. My eyes do not seem to have improved, though they are no worse. Some doubts, indecision and a little despair were making an attack, but Dr Lang reassured me. He found definite progression in the spirit body not yet apparent in the physical, and thinks it will not be long before it becomes evident. You may sneer if you must, but I believe him and came away trailing clouds of glory. Meanwhile, my big brother has had a second cataract removed in Jamaica by surgery.

  The Miners’ Strike. Biggest and most paralyzing event we have ever had. It is not just the temporary inconvenience of power cuts. We have candles, torches and alternative means of heating and cooking facilities. We cope. We try to plan our meals and domestic routines ahead, we buy in extra tins of this and that, we fill the odd thermos.

  It is the thought of what the long term effects may be that frighten us. If you tend to be over-imaginative, the prospect is terrifying. I was lucky earlier this week when I phoned the local fuel office. I think I have enough stock at the shop to last us well into late spring if weather continues mild, but was doubtful if I could last out till end of March at Wee.


  Ellen D.’s daughter came into the shop the other day. We were discussing the situation, when she said how much she enjoyed sawing up pieces of wood. Eagerly I said she could come and saw up some of mine. Bless her, she came round this afternoon in deluging rain and has tackled at least a quarter of it. She glowed as she worked, clothes soaked and hair dripping, and rushed off full of energy at 3.30 to go to collect her two children from school.

  Sunday, 25 June

  I wake to 8 a.m. news. Two more deaths and more violence in Northern Ireland … floods on east coast of USA subsiding … the floating £ … and the coldest recorded June due to quantity of icebergs adrift in the North Atlantic. The troubles in Ireland become like the war in Vietnam, part of the news pattern which one ignores.

  One morning I heard H.A. Williams being interviewed on his new book True Resurrection, it impelled me to order the book for myself.256 Live to create, he says, do not live to conform. I am timid, weak, and conform too often when immediate pressures are strong, but always regret it. I do not know at all how much of the joy I often feel overflows to influence others; I think very little.

  Have I recorded what the children did for me last autumn? How they spent one Sunday laying crazy paving all round back entrance so that I have a clean, dry walk to fuel and dustbin? Made a new herb bed, smashed up the old well, so that I now have another flower bed where oriental poppies are in glorious flower, some irises, new rose bushes.

  Sunday, 20 August

  Roses have blackspot and mildew.

  My car was badly smashed up 10 days ago. Another, travelling in opposite direction, went into a skid which driver couldn’t control, and crashed into offside of mine. I had three passengers, but mercifully no one was hurt. My car towed to local garage, where it awaits insurance wrangle, and police eventually brought us all home. Friends and neighbours are very kind with lifts.

  Wednesday, 18 October

  A super birthday, quite unplanned. I don’t like being reminded of the passing years. But nice cards and letters arrived this morning, and, just as I was leaving, the Coalite.

  News of ‘The Road’ broke officially today. This great shadow which has hung over us for the past five or more years has moved away. The Minister has refused all seven (I did not know there were so many) applications for a bypass route. The need, he concludes, has not been proved, and we must now wait to find out what the effect of the new roads already under construction to east and west of us will have on the one through the villages. This is in effect what The Farnham Villages Assoc has been hammering out all along.

  The poor little Morris was pronounced a write-off. And then miracle of miracles – Babs’s neighbour (a Lloyds underwriter) is retiring and buying a new car in November, and is willing to part with his present one at trade-in price (£150!). A 1964 Singer Vogue meticulously maintained.

  I was describing the birthday, wasn’t I? Sandwich lunch with the art group. Liz had organised a small ‘reception’ and a hastily designed greetings card signed by all of them. Really heart-warming. The sideboard in the sitting room is gay with cards, I am amused and charmed by them all, particularly one from my rude young family: ‘You are at a difficult time of life (picture of distraught little man at desk). Too tired to work, too poor to quit.’

  Sunday, 12 November

  The Singer was brought over this afternoon. Roy (with Babs as back-seat driver) took me for trial run in the Beeches. I think I managed fairly well, but am loaded once more with dreads and fears. All switches differently placed again, a different set of gears to master, handbrake on the right instead of the left, pedals larger and more widely spaced.

  Friday, 2 February 1973

  Mrs H. at The Bon Bon is telling the village that I have had a breast removed. Why these fantastic sort of rumours still shock me I don’t know. I should be hardened by now. I have heard so many distortions of truth not only about myself but about dozens of others in our community. How do they start, who first actually said, ‘Miss P. has had a breast removed’?

  I went down with flu on Xmas eve and spent the whole holiday in bed. Was beginning to recover, idling in front of sitting room fire, when I felt acute pain and was very sick. I managed to crawl into bed with h.w. bottle, and then discovered a small hard lump in my groin. I staggered down to the phone and spoke to the on-call doctor, who was round within a few minutes, diagnosed a strangulated hernia and ordered an immediate operation.

  I think I have never lived through such a nightmare as the next few hours. It was 10 o’clock at night, the day’s washing up not done, five little cats waiting to be fed. ‘I can’t go to hospital!’ I cried. ‘Oh yes you can,’ answered Dr S. ‘There must be someone you can phone.’ Neighbour Nan F. came at once and took complete charge and got me ready for the ambulance, and next day telephoned key people like Kay and Babs.

  I was bundled up and carried through freezing fog to the Canadian Red Cross Hospital at Taplow, too tense and dazed for tears. They operated at 2.15 a.m. The hospital, the subdued bustle, the questions. A West Indian nurse asking who was my next of kin and me replying ‘they are in Jamaica’ and seeing her eyes grow enormous. The pale green light in the anaesthetist’s room, two Indians I think hovering about and telling me to breathe deeply. Then deep oblivion and coming to in the ward bed feeling as though I had had a wonderful night’s rest.

  Kay turned up in visitors’ time that afternoon. I could hear her at foot of my bed asking for me. I must have been quite unrecognisable, and I didn’t even have my plate in. Dear, loyal, wonderful Kay. She and Anne would look after the shop, they would bring me the mail, they would visit me often.

  I have received so much attention and loving kindness. In fact, I think this last five weeks have been one of the most exciting and rewarding periods of my life. Two weeks in hospital, then two weeks with Babs and Roy, able to provide just what a convalescent aunt needed, a quiet, warm home where I had nothing to do but be pampered.

  One is, astonishingly, as weak as water. Recovery was also complicated by my fiendish cough. I coughed so much in hospital I kept the whole ward awake, and would stagger to the toilet in the morning hacking away like an old bronchitic and could scarcely get my breath. More than once a nurse found me gasping as I clung to a wash basin. The cough continued at Babs’s – kept them awake at night too.

  A week ago today Babs brought me back to Wee. Her doctor advised two weeks off work. It has been heaven, heaven, heaven. All the cats rejoicing. Have not smoked since Xmas eve and so far have no desire to.

  Saturday, 10 February

  And then one morning one wakes at daybreak, the whole soul rejoicing because one feels better. Really better – the days of shortness of breath and lack of appetite are ending. There is a faint itch after breakfast or coffee or any good meal, or a sudden little wave of excitement for something, some extra small satisfaction, and one thinks of a cigarette. But then one thinks, ‘but it is not going to promise any pleasure – I do not want one.’ And one finds something to nibble or suck, a nut or a lozenge, and one forgets the irritating thought.

  Have only popped into shop occasionally to see how things are going, answer queries, pick up mail. I have a nasty suspicion that I am not supposed to do even this while drawing sick pay, but am not going to declare it.

  Friday, 30 March

  Dear Lord. I sit on the little stool by kitchen fire (heavy with good supper and too much Dubonnet) and turn off Any Questions. For two months I was the centre of sympathetic attention and basked in it. I had leisure, had a taste of what retirement in the modern sense could be like, and life had a different, richer sort of quality. One could move from day to day without harassment.

  My business that I once loved has become a teasing, tiresome and unprofitable burden. I can see no future for it and am losing heart. Yet I wish to complete two more years so that I can say ‘20 years’.

  Monday, 9 April

  The new Cats and Catdom Annual arrived. A.A. has given me a tremendous ‘paw-pat’, a
nd this has done much for my morale. ‘A great character in the Cat Fancy … 17 years specialising etc’. And yet still I walk on the edge of melancholy, a slough of despond lapping at my ankles.

  Photo of a January bridegroom in an old newspaper on kitchen table catches my eye. He wears a grey topper on top of shoulder-length hair, and looks fantastic.

  Monday, 22 April

  I picked out, carelessly, from the bookcase, Shane Leslie’s The End of a Chapter (inscribed ‘To Lucie the Moog from Hugh, 1945’).257 Except that I recognise Hugh Laming’s handwriting, and remember that this is what he called me, I recall nothing about the presentation.

  I am still not smoking. I realise that whatever one thought one got out of it is an illusion, like all drugs. What is it one wants so desperately and never finds? Cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, sex, food, reading, music, sleep – none of these bring any lasting satisfaction, real fulfilment. One knows only that one is forever dissatisfied and hollow and agonisingly alone. All round one is a vast wilderness, or there may be if one moves from the familiar daily circle of known living. Why have we lived? Have we lived? The flower at least may have given some pleasure, joy, perfume to the world. Or it may have lived to blush unseen.

  Thursday, 17 May

  It seems to go on and on, this tiredness and despair. For a few days at a time, maybe, all seems fine again, I work reasonably well and even feel happy at it, especially if I can do some useful gardening as well. Then wham! down we go, no energy, no inclination or wish to be doing anything but what I am doing. Cannot make decisions or plans. People say ‘you need a little holiday,’ which I suppose I do, but this calls for more effort and organising than I can summon. The thought of journeys I may have to make by car fill me with cold, paralyzing horror.