A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  I look so well now, that is the trouble, have put on some weight and my face has filled out, making it less haggard. More colour too, it’s all rather misleading and tiresome. I fear now that I am a fraud and evading all sorts of important challenges, and am in danger of growing ‘soggy’. Declining into a vapid and fretful old age. Horrible!

  Sunday, 24 June

  Today I spent with Babs and family at Pyrford. I did not want to do this journey – the first time I have driven further than Slough or Beaconsfield since my illness.258 From the time I woke at 7 to the time I started at about 11 I went through the tortures of the damned. I wanted to die, to be seriously ill, so that I could phone and postpone the visit. Feeling sick with knots in the stomach and gripped at the throat – just what actors go through before a performance. I got there adequately without trouble. I need to take a few driving lessons from a professional, just to tighten and polish and sort out my confusions.

  Roy has given me some very helpful suggestions for possible plans ahead. Developers are beginning to nibble again for the Florence Cottages property. I have to look ahead now, to old age, decline and senility and accept that I need capital.

  Sunday, 8 July

  I have been offered £30,000 for the shop property.

  I cannot take this in and all its implications. How much will be left once the Inland Revenue have sucked their fill? Will there be enough to keep me in comfort for the rest of my life (20–30 years at most and perhaps much less)?

  I do not want to give up the business. I have been thinking in terms of finding space cheaply somewhere where I could carry on with second-hand books by mail order, still specialising in cat books. But there will be an end to the Bookshop as such in Farnham Common, and this I find bitter. I have established one now, and if circumstances were different I could have retired, selling to the right people to carry it on. This would have given me the feeling of having contributed something solid and real and growing to the community.

  Sunday, 12 August

  My solicitor R.P. is ill, so I have progressed no further. I am ill too, sick to the heart’s marrow, but I do not know why. The invasive melancholy which has haunted me throughout convalescence increases and increases. I do not know how to combat it.

  I wake early and doze fitfully until it is time to get up. And as soon as I reach this wakeful state, beyond the blessed peace and oblivion of night, I am conscious of weight across the diaphragm like lead. It lessens but doesn’t lift all day, and I long only for bedtime. The garden is being neglected. I force myself through the work at the shop that must be done, but my enthusiasm and interest is dead. Minor worries become monstrous – recently, persecution from Beeches authorities about the parking of my car on their sacrosanct land upset me hugely. Mercifully, a very kind neighbour has given me use of a piece of waste land outside his property only a few yards away. A great relief, but the desolation and despair continue. So much so that I have to confess to it openly. I have been again to the doctor who has prescribed further tonic (Beconite) and a holiday.

  The holiday is booked at end of September, to Newquay, with my ponderously kind P.D. It must be endured, this malaise, and lived through. A cancer of the soul – is it?

  Sunday, 19 August

  [Glued clipping from Radio Times:]

  Radio 4, 7.30 p.m. New Lifelines in Medicine.

  Seven programmes about the developments which in the last decade have transformed the science of medicine.

  7. Depression

  Being ‘down in the dumps’ or having ‘the blues’ is a common enough experience for most of us. It is not pleasant, but it passes. We cannot easily imagine having the blues permanently, and so severely that life seems either pointless or worse – daily torture. This is depressive illness at its most severe, and it demands medical treatment.

  I listened to this programme and recognised all the symptoms. Sensations of isolation, anxiety and guilt. A great fatigue, escape into sleep whenever possible, night and day. Is too much hope and emphasis being placed on the drugs now found effective towards a cure? Do we want to cure or heal?

  Sunday, 2 September

  Yes, I am a lot better, and on Friday a letter from brother Pooh with tremendous news. He and Ivy have decided to sell up and come home. The children and Roy have spent summer holidays in Jamaica, and full discussion was therefore possible. This is glorious, glorious news for me. I had thought of them as dug in and settled forever, and that unless I could make a huge effort and find the funds to visit them, might never see them again.

  Yet I wake this morning still with a black cloud in the head – despair, despair. Why? Where does it come from?

  Monday, 10 September

  I made up my mind to find the location of a new wholesaler in Slough. I knew it would be difficult among tiresome back streets, ‘No Entries’, ‘No Right Turns’ and so on, obscure, difficult access with difficult parking. All of which proved true, so that I nearly gave up and drove back to FC more than once. Resolving to pluck up the heart, I pressed on.

  This is the wholesaler I need and will be our salvation. I hope. Van service of W.H. Smith and Bookwise are now virtually non-existent. I was in despair about our daily bread-and-butter stock, and now I have seen what can be had on our doorstep I can finish with W.H.S. Their service has been becoming more and more atrocious for 12 months or more. I can see my way ahead now, without stumbling.

  ‘Eighteen years old, long blonde hair, Indian headband … suede jacket, fringed skirt, green eyes … Her companion, a morose bearded creature … sported an Afro hairdo … festooned with love beads … his heliotrope bell-bottoms kept up by broad leather belt, the buckle of which was fashioned in shape of a penis.’

  This image of our new generation is quoted from last pages of David Niven’s The Moon’s A Balloon, just to remind me how really repulsive it has become to older people, but isn’t universal. The young that I know aren’t like this, but the shadow, the influences, are there, and make one shudder. Shudder.

  Wednesday, 31 October

  Pooh and Ivy are flying home tonight. I have had my holiday in Newquay with that appalling woman P.D. Kay and her husband have moved to their new home near Chepstow. I have a promising replacement in the shop in D.W.

  The developers have withdrawn their offer. After much discussion and digging around, I discovered that their scheme was too urban for our County Planning approval – huge office blocks were intended. I might have known it couldn’t come true, that offer.

  N. came on Sunday. It is years since she visited Wee. She has bought herself a little terrace house in Yorks but is not very happy about it.

  Saturday, 3 November

  It takes alcohol to release me.

  Tomorrow I am due to meet again, after 16 years, my big brother Pooh. They arrived at Heathrow on Thursday, early, and at 9 a.m. phoned me from Babs’s home in Surrey. I could only remember with icy anguish that tomorrow morning I had another hour’s cross-country drive, possibly through fog, before any pleasure could be realised. That would be damped, torturing me, by the thought of the drive home again.

  Now, after 2–3 glasses of Dubonnet in warm, loving kitchen, waiting for supper potatoes to bake, I am happy, filled with longing and wonder. How shall I find him? Babs says that his nerves are ‘all shot to pieces’. All the Pratts, i.e. my father’s brothers and their children, tend to this high-strung response to living, almost a stutter, an inability to be coherent, to express themselves calmly. I am like it, too.

  Tuesday, 13 November

  Life has withered him. He is a husk. But I love him, I love him, and he loves me and that is very warming. Ivy is splendid, and surprised me with her welcome. Both are delighted to be home again, are thrilled by all the privileges granted by National Health to OAPs, and by how much cheaper are commodities here than Ja.

  Last Friday/Saturday, dear old lady Priss went on her way, another dear little cat gone. For months she had been failing, so frail, but her eyes still big and lustrous, h
er appetite healthy and her affection immense. Until Friday evening, when she refused all food and wanted only to be left in her basket by the fire. On Saturday I found her curled there, very cold and still. That is how I wish them all to go, in their own time. But my heart again was torn apart – goodbye, dear, dear little Priss.

  Now we are four. MaryAnne, Buster, George and Tweezle.

  48.

  Now We Know

  Sunday, 25 November 1973 (aged sixty-four)

  I have been slipping down a riverbank, saved from immersion by my hold on an old strong tree trunk. This feeling has continued day after day all the summer. Last summer I caught another chill which went to the chest, and I had a fair excuse to visit doctor again. He examined the chest and pronounced it clear. No undue shortage of breath, no anaemia, nothing at all in my body to blame for this dreadful darkness of the spirit. I tried to explain it a little: Dr S. was as sympathetic as I suppose a GP can be. He told me to take heed of my age and suggested that I make an effort to wind down business responsibilities.

  But I do not think I can do this yet. I do not want to be enveloped in Old Age. I am 64 but don’t feel it – I want still to do the things and at the pace I did at the age of 54 or 44.

  Monday, 3 December

  I am overfull of Dubonnet again. Following confession to Doc S. and his course of antibiotics, I was feeling wholly able to cope with this last weekend, when I went to London for the NCC show at Olympia. It was a terrific day, we took over £500, nearly half of this due to sale of two spectacular cat encyclopaedias. I can do it. I can. This is the boost I needed, leaving me with nearly £100 in the bank, towards meeting at least two-thirds due to publishers. And today I heard from Babs that they can put me up for the night at Xmas, and this will make the day for me, not having to get into a frenzy about driving home. Yes, I am better, better! (And very drunk.)

  Sunday, 16 December

  The ‘betterness’ really continues, thank God. How can one explain this? I did not imagine that black pall. It did envelope me all those months and I could not escape it.

  Was it partly premonition of our present troubles? They become a challenge, like a war. Fuel shortages, threats of blackouts, railway chaos, paper shortage and the ‘three-day’ week for industry and commerce. No developer is going to come to my rescue at this moment of doom and gloom.

  Still not smoking. Not one cigarette since last December. There is no virtue in it, no struggle, no anguish. I simply do not want to smoke.

  Wednesday, 2 January 1974

  Mr H. heard on TV that small shops may use three hours of electricity per day at any time. I think we may get by with shop lights only in the afternoon.

  Tuesday, 12 February

  Said Anne C. today: ‘I am not in the least interested in this coming General Election. Each party will promise wonderful solutions to our crises which none will be able to carry out. I am not going to listen to them on TV or read the newspapers, I simply do not believe a word they say.’ This is exactly how I feel, and am quite sure we are not the only two in GB who do.

  Tuesday, 12 March

  Election now over, and Labour back, stepping very cautiously. Emergency measures removed, and full light and heat (electric) restored to industry and business, and the five-day week. Though some firms have found that their men work so much better and produce more in three days that they have started them back on a four-day week only.

  I have a dream, I know now what I want to do. I want if it is possible to forget the possibility of being swallowed by developers, or beaten down because of a road improvement. I want to divide the shop into two units and sell the goodwill of the new book business to Carter & Wheeler in Slough, and rent them the original front shop so that they could carry on a branch of their very excellent Slough business. I to withdraw completely from this side of the business, taking only the secondhand portion and my cat book speciality, keeping the backroom office. They would of course pay me an agreed rent.

  I could carry on mainly by mail order and open one day a week (Saturday). I could do work of interest in my own time, relieved of all the present pressures. FC can be sure of its bookshop for at least another decade.

  Sunday, 12 May

  I had a dream, but it died. I approached L.W. of Carter & Wheeler but he was not impressed. He has now a super-modern business in Slough, his whole overlook on bookselling is urban, up-to-date and quite different from my slapdash rural cosy and intimate attitude. No, he was not impressed. Forget it, Jean.

  The new business rates are paralyzing. As foggy a future as I have ever faced.

  Tuesday, 16 July

  Throughout May and June I struggled on at shop, trying to get the year’s accounts prepared for an audit. Preparing for invasion of primary school children bent on securing prizes. We have had nearly 60 so far. I had forgotten how sophisticated the 10, 11, 12 year-old can be.

  Saturday, 10 August

  It is midnight. Somewhere nearby the young are holding high revel with a discotheque. It is the most ghastly noise. I have not been sleeping well, not for months. Radio can soothe me sometimes. I discovered not only the BBC World Service, but LBC (London Broadcasting Company) which often keeps me wide awake. Astonishing phenomenon of the times these phone call-ins.

  Sunday, 11 August

  Another bad night, maybe because of the discotheque. I wake as depressed as ever. Money and what best to do with the business dominate, but also at the core is an increasing sense of my loneliness.

  And also the problem of my eyes. The left eye is slightly worse: very small print now almost impossible to read without a magnifying glass. Am haunted by the thoughts of an operation. Have started again to link up if possible with Dr Lang.

  Sunday, 29 September

  Dr D. came again on Friday, and is to call for third time tomorrow. When a NH patient has to have three visits at home from their doctor, you can be pretty sure they are ill. The fact that I had been sleeping badly slipped out, and he at once asked if I had been feeling depressed. It is true – the medical profession does recognise depression as a sickness now. This is itself a relief. My problems (some of them) began to tumble out. He seemed to understand and prescribed an ‘anti-depressant’ (Surmontil).259 I wake with a headache and feel heavy all morning.

  I have done it – once more back into one little shop. Anne and Sarah met me at 2.30. Anne began to get anxious that I was overdoing it but it was a tonic: the fact of achieving this long-planned move ‘back’ and finding that the stock all fitted in reasonably well. ‘But why are you doing this?’ I shall be asked. For reasons of economy. To cut the rates and reduce overheads. You have only to listen-in to know how rising costs are hitting the small man; the retailers’ problems were mentioned only this morning on a BBC programme. Also, every time I am forced into an illness I have to call a doctor and am told I am doing too much.

  Old Hys who travelled for Batsford turned up again last week.260 He is a fearsome old gossip, and what intrigued me to learn was that so many of the surviving smaller bookshops survive as they do because there is money behind them, a rich stockbroker husband/father/boyfriend, or just money of the owner’s own to burn. I have kept going for almost 20 years without subsidies, except for the capital obtained from Homefield and Miss Drumm’s help in securing the freehold. It is very doubtful I could have managed without these aids.

  Which brings me to the most wonderful, most unlooked for, most undeserved gift I have yet received. In August I took time off to visit Joan and Vahan in their new home at Radlett. I babbled to Joan about my woes, when she suddenly asked how much money I needed. It seems with the inheritance from her parents, and Vahan’s fees recently scooped in after some delay, they now have too much capital and are in the ‘Super Tax’ bracket, and therefore want to get rid of, temporarily, as much as they can to relieve the tax situation. I am to have £2,500 interest free for two years.261

  I cannot quite take this in. It is so rare in this frightful age of grasp and me-first. This is
of course another great boost to my flagging spirit. I can clear the bank loan on Wee, and the overdraft, and have a few hundred in hand for repairs and improvements.

  Monday, 2 December

  How pleasant it is to have money.

  Sunday, 8 December

  Tomorrow my new shop tenants, the florists, open. Yesterday was opening day for an antiques shop, very splendid and lush and Cotswoldsy. So now at our end of the village we have antiques, a picture gallery, flowers and books. Highly cultural.

  I eat nut roast (rather over-cooked) with baked pot, sprouts, carrot and turnip, and apricot tartlet with tinned apricots and sour milk. I have not suffered at all from sugar shortage or bakers’ strike. Because of Joan’s loan I am lashing out and having the kitchen rejuvenated. My ambition was a ‘pine’ kitchen, but this far too expensive. But that is the motif: two new cabinets – formica, pine-faced, and the two kitchen rooms repainted to a ‘pine’ scheme. (Airing cupboards built round hot water tank and pipes last year faced with ‘knotty pine’ special boarding.)

  Saturday, 28 December

  This Christmas I have been guest at three separate groaning boards, each beautifully and lovingly decorated. What a feast it has become for us in this section of society: the enormous turkey, stuffing, roast pots, sprouts and other vegetables favoured by the hostess, sauces, gravy, wine to drink, plum pudding, mince pies, cream, lard sauce (i.e. not butter), nuts, sweets, crackers until one feels like dying quietly.

  Next week we begin the new shop regime. This will in theory give me Monday and Wednesday at home. It is what I have been aiming at, the planned retirement operation.

  Wednesday, 12 February

  Margaret Thatcher has been elected leader of the Conservative Party. I am fascinated.

  Trying to read Margaret Drabble without success. I find her too heavily influenced by Henry James, yet feel I am shirking something. In The Needle’s Eye, for instance, Rose suddenly says splendidly, ‘… the things I do now, they’re part of me, they’re monotonous yes I know, but they’re not boring, I like them, I do them all – I do them all with love. Getting up, drawing the curtains, shopping, going to bed.’