In 1934, when she was living in Wembley at the age of twenty-five, Jean wrote in her journal that the diarist had a purpose both special and peculiar. The skill lay not just in sifting the significant events, but in combining facts with the feelings and ideas they aroused. A diarist must have ‘intuitive knowledge of the values of these fragments which pile up’, in order to ‘capture and crystallise moments on the wing’. And there was one more requirement, a promise to the reader: ‘This,’ future generations should be able to say as they turn the glittering pages, ‘was the present then. This was true.’
Notes
Frontispiece
1 Added to beginning of diaries some months after commencement.
1. Into a Cow
2 Leslie her brother is eight years her senior.
3 Monsieur Beaucaire, starring Rudolph Valentino.
4 A silent melodrama with themes of unrequited love and forbidden marriage.
2. Jean Rotherham
5 Helen Lavender Norris was the passenger in the racing car being driven by Cyril Bone at Brooklands circuit near Weybridge in Surrey when it crashed at 100 mph. She was twenty.
6 The film was The Rolling Road. Released in 1928, it was co-produced by Michael Balcon some years before his Hitchcock and Ealing classics.
7 Matriculation: the standard necessary to qualify for university entrance.
8 The Pratts’ Fiat. Jean has been taking driving lessons with her family for several months.
9 From ‘Eleonora’, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.
10 Princess Helena College.
3. Such a Long Way Down
11 A mandatory driving test was not introduced until 1935.
4. Two Girls Who Whispered Once
12 Jean’s work at her father’s architecture practice consisted of secretarial and administrative duties. Many of her diary entries contain passages where she is staring out of the window.
13 Glyn was a popular and sometimes scandalous British writer. Her novel It, published in 1927, popularised the concept of a person – male or female – possessing a certain talent of mind or character which makes them instantly attractive to a member of the opposite sex.
14 The first Armistice Day commemoration was held within the gates of Buckingham Palace on 11 November 1919.
15 Her father, George Percy Pratt.
16 She was taking part in an unnamed play for her local amateur dramatic association. The journals contain no further details, and no mention of rehearsals.
17 Before the Hindenburg, the British-made R101 was the world’s largest airship. It crashed on its maiden overseas voyage over France, killing 48 of 54 passengers and crew.
18 Her brother Leslie.
19 A three-handed variation of the card game Euchre.
20 This formed the last entry in a crimson exercise book. The back of the book contained an exclamatory list of ‘Danger Dont’s’: ‘Don’t play at being “last across” on any road or street! Don’t hang onto a vehicle nor climb on it! Don’t forget to walk on the footpath, if there is one!’
21 Jacob Epstein’s majestic Genesis, a sculpture in white marble, showed a naked woman in the later stages of pregnancy. Controversy raged: the Daily Express called it ‘You white foulness!’ A cloud of thinly disguised anti-Semitism presided over other critiques.
5. A Man Shorter than Myself
22 Such questions would only be resolved (and then only partially and with much violence) with the partition and independence of India in 1947.
23 Jean had recently visited her brother stationed at Porthcurno, near Penzance in Cornwall, the hub of England’s telegraph and underground cable network that would play a vital role in communications during the Second World War. Leslie Pratt was employed by the Eastern Telegraph Company (later Cable & Wireless), and Jean witnessed her brother read out a message to an occupant in Sloane Square, Chelsea. ‘Heartiest congrats. Another of life’s customs passed. All my love, David.’ She noted other messages coming in from Alexandria, Singapore and Newfoundland.
24 Crabbed Age and Youth
Cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance,
Age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn,
Age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave,
Age like winter bare …
(Attributed to Shakespeare)
25 Mannin was a prolific novelist and memoirist. Among the first, alongside Jean’s other favourite Beverley Nichols, to be published by Penguin.
26 Jean was reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
6. The Popular Idea of Love
27 Published as ‘Oxford Street Tide’ in Good Housekeeping, 1931.
28 Jean was now living alone in a rented flat in Charlotte Street, on the edge of Fitzroy Square, surrounded by what she called her ‘madly bohemian friends’ from college.
29 Elsewhere she translates it from the Latin: ‘I must go higher yet.’
30 Jean’s college friends are seldom short of nicknames, but Peter/Gus outdoes them all. Neither Peter nor Gus are his real name: he is known to his parents as Geoffrey Harris. In later years, as a writer, he adopts the nom de plume Heron Carvic. His sexuality also seems to be in raging flux.
31 The Gornolds were family friends in Brighton.
32 Voting had been extended to women in the UK in 1928.
33 A skilled operator of a trading barge.
34 Her maternal uncle Fred Lucey was treasurer of Philip Morris & Co Ltd in New York. In 1916, Tobacco World magazine wrote: ‘F.S. Lucey, of Philip Morris & Company, is one of the keenest students in the trade of conditions which affect their business, and has always on tap a few most original deductions which epitomise the true state of affairs.’
7. All His Honeyed Deceit
35 This is David Aberdeen (1913–1987), who went on to become a successful architect. He is best remembered for the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square and Congress House in Bloomsbury, reportedly inspired by Corbusier. The courtyard of Congress House contains a wall relief by Jacob Epstein.
36 Jean met Chris Naude not long before her trip to Russia, but there are no details of the event. We learn elsewhere that his parents are probably friends of her family, and that he has a diplomatic role at the South African High Commission in Trafalgar Square. Jean visited the building in 1932, a few months before it opened, and she had previously attended a lecture by its architect, Sir Herbert Baker.
37 Up to a point: it becomes clear later that she did not lose her virginity on the trip.
38 Later in her journal she regrets that a strictly observed career path may leave no room for dreaming or a more imaginative temperament.
39 A while later, Jean added: ‘These were petting parties. I was never his mistress.’
40 As hand-written on Jean’s lecture notepaper by Joan Hey, UCL. Several of Jean’s college friends call her Mausie in this period, although the origin is unclear.
41 Jean added later: ‘No. Homosexual.’
42 An analysis of the post-war world. As well as providing a social survey of women’s role in society, Philip Gibbs’s study examined the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, the civil war in Russia and the role of the League of Nations.
43 Her brother’s work with Cable & Wireless took him to a new country. A local woman named Ivy soon became his wife.
8. Of Her Own Accord
44 This is Ethel ‘Babs’ Everett, the inheritor of these journals (see Introduction). In a later entry, Jean writes of sewing bunnies onto her blue woolly shawl. Elsewhere, Babs is also referred to – affectionately – as ‘the Pratts’ Brat’.
45 He was still working for Cable & Wireless. Kingston had just been hit by a hurricane.
46 It was her 24th birthday.
9. The Young Girl Glider
47 Jean begins her fourth hardback journal. Woolf kept a journal between 1915 (when she was 33) until a few days before her death in 1941, leaving behind 26 volumes. She regarded them no
t only as a record of events and people she had met, but as a critique of the writing of others and a method of trying out new rhythms and techniques of her own. Leonard Woolf produced an edited version named A Writer’s Diary in 1953, but the complete journals are also in print.
48 Young (1880–1949) was an independent-minded novelist and suffragette, and for many years lived infamously as ‘Mrs Daniels’ in a ménage à trois in London with a married man and his wife.
49 She did get away, to Alfriston in Sussex.
50 A family friend.
51 This being Bath, our heroine’s romantic adventures cannot but henceforth take on a distinctly Austen-ish air.
52 She called it The Suburban Chronicle. It soon turned from a play into a novel, and would take her three years to complete.
53 She’ll be 25 in October.
54 According to his biography on the flap of a book he wrote about the history of Hampshire, Colin Wintle went on to work in Fleet Street for the Daily Mirror and News Chronicle. He became a major in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the war, and upon demobilisation established a public relations company, working principally for charitable and voluntary organisations.
10. Twentieth-Century Blues
55 It is yet to appear. Stella Benson, a feminist, novelist and travel writer, was popular in her day (Virginia Woolf mourned her passing), but is now largely forgotten.
56 Brunel’s Great Western Railway.
57 Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor since 1932. Dollfuss, a Christian Socialist, established an Austrian fascism modelled on that of Mussolini. He was assassinated in the Chancellery in an attempted coup d’état by a faction of Austrian Nazis.
58 Mary Kate Glanville, a new friend and holiday companion. Jean writes that she was related to radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi.
59 Francis Stuart was a prodigious and popular Irish novelist. His activities in Berlin during the war gained him a reputation as a Nazi sympathiser, an accusation he denied.
60 This is Babs, Jean’s niece, now aged one.
61 When discussing this issue a few days later, Jean states: ‘Think what England will owe to me! I shall have saved half its population from going to the dogs, and been responsible for more stalwart sons than I would ever manage on my own.’
62 Of Prince George and Princess Marina.
11. T.S. Eliot Surprised Me
63 Although Jean’s interest in global politics was limited, she did tend in her journals to select key events that would shape her own world. This was one: the conflict between Italy and Ethiopia (which resulted in Italy’s invasion in October) would have direct consequences on the Second World War. Fascist Italy would soon ally itself with Germany, and the League of Nations would prove itself ineffective as a force for peace.
64 The Architectural Association in London.
65 Sir Richard Sheppard CBE, 1910–1982. It was not an accident, but polio. His firm Richard Sheppard, Robson & Partners designed many schools and university buildings, including Manchester Polytechnic, Imperial College London and Churchill College Cambridge. His firm, still thriving, was a pioneer in sustainable architecture.
66 Louis de Soissons was best known for his work on the development of Welwyn Garden City and around fifty European war cemeteries.
67 The Tomorrow Club, a precursor to the International Pen club, was established in 1917 by Catherine Amy Dawson Scott as a place where young writers could meet and hear established authors and publishers. Based in Covent Garden, speakers included H.G. Wells, Siegfried Sassoon and T.S. Eliot.
68 The book, by Frederic Farrar, was first published in 1858. A moral fable set in a boys’ boarding school, it follows one pupil’s descent from privilege to what the author calls ‘all folly and wickedness’; the only solace is religion. Parents bought it as a warning; school children were given it as a threat.
69 The National Government was a Conservative-dominated coalition led since June 1935 by Stanley Baldwin.
70 University College School, a liberal public school in Hampstead, north-west London. The editor of these journals went there too.
71 James Hilton was the author of Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr Chips, and won an Oscar for the screenplay of Mrs Miniver.
72 Gus has rented a flat with an actor friend named Zoe, and for weeks has been asking Jean to join them.
12. Like a Knife, He Said
73 A popular, easily digested formula for babies and invalids.
74 Jean is living off an income of £200 per annum: inheritance from her uncle Fred Lucey, and her father.
75 C.A. Lewis was a fighter pilot in the First World War, and Sagittarius Rising documented his exploits. He was a founder of the British Broadcasting Company, the precursor to the BBC.
13. Israel Epstein
76 Jean had been taking dancing classes at the Empress Rooms in Kensington for three weeks. Her teacher, Gwen Silvester, was the sister of bandleader and ballroom connoisseur Victor Silvester.
77 The abdication crisis had been raging since October. King Edward VIII’s devotion to Wallis Simpson, who was still married to her second husband, caused both a social and constitutional scandal. Edward was the titular head of the Church of England, which forbade the marriage; he chose to abdicate rather than give Simpson up, and their marriage the following year lasted until his death thirty-five years later.
78 Fort Belvedere was the country house in Windsor Great Park where their relationship first blossomed.
79 Her roman à clef of her Bath newspaper days. See 13 April 1934.
80 Dickson was a highly regarded publisher and biographer, initially with his own company, and then at Macmillan.
81 She didn’t find much hidden treasure. Jean lived in Malta for ten months. Despite her initial optimism, her days were beset with the usual feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, combined with the now-standard flirtations with unsuitable and exploitative men. Her virginity remained securely intact (while Nockie cheated on the married man with whom she was having an affair). Her journals concentrated on her new friends and her architectural explorations of the island, but most entries were unremarkable. Her greatest success came when she was commissioned by Architectural Review to submit an article with photographs about Valletta. She also continued working on her novel The Suburban Chronicle, and despite her avowed attempt to develop her character and ‘build something solid of my own’ (rather than being ‘swamped’ by the influence of others), she became enamoured with the writing of the spiritualist and psychotherapist Graham Howe, an early practitioner at the burgeoning Tavistock Clinic in London. She frequently wanted to return home, but felt she should remain on the island until Nockie also returned. Only towards the end of her stay did she pay much attention to the gathering storms of war.
82 The analyst ran a practice in Harley Street, proposing a spiritual course of enlightenment called the Open Way. R.D. Laing claimed him as a significant influence, although others shunned him for his vanity and lack of scientific methodology. Jean’s favourite book of his was I & Me, published by Faber.
83 The Dampf-Kraft-Wagen, a once-popular German make.
14. Into the Woods
84 Elsewhere, Jean describes his Harley Street consulting room: ‘There are always several vases of garden flowers about the room. His desk faces an open window. His patient sits in a deep armchair in a corner on the right hand side of the desk. There is a divan along one wall covered in soft green.’ There is a mirror above the mantelpiece and a photo of a woman on his desk. ‘A strong, open, pleasant face – is it his wife?’
85 An American comedy by Robert E. Sherwood. The film of the play featured Clark Gable singing ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’.
86 Grig was a new friend from Bournemouth.
87 ‘Top people’s’ London nightclub.
88 As Mansfield referred to her own journals. She did indeed destroy the bulk of those she kept between 1909 and 1912. In an earlier entry, Jean had noted: ‘How lovely to be able to write [, as does Kat
herine Mansfield]: “The idea of fame, of being a success – that’s nothing, less than nothing. I love my family and a few others dearly …” And, “Life without work – I would commit suicide. Therefore work is more important than life.”’
89 Ivor Brown, her new co-lodger in her Hampstead flat.
90 Jean chose isolation. Wee Cottage and next-door Gypsy Cottage East were situated in a clearing deep within the Beeches (more than 500 acres of ancient woodland), and about half a mile from the nearest main road. Beautiful and bleak, according to mood and season.
91 It appears that she has taken on responsibility of finding a lodger for the neighbouring cottage, a task that will later pass to the owner, Ms Moneypenny.
92 A popular and famously moody bandleader and his pianist/singer wife.
93 The Spongs ran the local grocery store. Mrs Spong is still remembered in the village for her home-made cakes.
15. The Boys in the Village
94 British Expeditionary Force.
95 The Frasers are neighbours in the Beeches.
96 To read more of Jean’s Mass Observation diaries (1940–1948) please see We Are at War, Private Battles and Our Hidden Lives (all edited by Simon Garfield and published by Ebury Press).
16. Your Mother in Englant
97 Penguin Parade was a series of short books previewing new stories and poems by contemporary and largely unknown writers.
98 Later to become the Home Guard (and later still Dad’s Army).
99 W.N.P. Barbellion was the pseudonym of Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889–1919). The Journal of a Disappointed Man, printed initially with a preface by H.G. Wells, details his love of natural history and his battle with multiple sclerosis, and is regarded as a classic memoir. It remains in print.
100 This article was by three women: A.F. Cunningham, a Mrs Hardinge, and ‘Lisl’. It argued convincingly that the position of women under Nazi rule was increasingly inferior compared to the Weimar Republic, with little influence over social issues, much less political ones.
101 Their father was the architect Valentine Harding. Jean was to become good friends with his wife Peggy.
A Notable Woman Page 66