201 Mrs Dale’s Diary ran from 1948 to 1969, a radio soap opera that preceded The Archers by two years. It was a cosy, middle-class drama, much prone to parody.
202 The novel, an adventure set in the eighteenth century, is called Heiress Caroline.
203 This was the great travel writer’s first book, a flowery and highly opinionated guide to the Caribbean. Modern readers may baulk at his descriptions of natives and native customs, including cannibalism.
204 Note added later: ‘I retrieved it from the bank and find it better than I thought. I shall not sell it yet, but wear it sometimes.’
42. Self-knowledge
205 Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, established in 1926.
206 Joseph, the renowned publisher of H.E. Bates, Monica Dickens, Joyce Carey and Vita Sackville-West, personally wrote or edited at least seven books about cats, including Best Cat Stories, published by Faber in the year of Jean’s submission.
207 Light on the Path by Mabel Collins, a seminal introductory theosophical text, first published in 1888.
208 The instructions were not included within the journals, and have since been lost. Babs was indeed her principal executor (see Introduction).
209 At this stage, Spot (sometimes referred to as The Damned Spot) lived with Jean and Pinnie, Pewter Puss, The Senator, Joey, Nicky, Pepper and Squib.
210 The fog – or Great Smog as it became known – hung over London and its suburbs from 5th to 9th December, and is generally acknowledged as the worst of the century. It was caused by a combination of industrial pollution, a cold snap leading to the mass lighting of domestic coal fires, and a perverse high-pressure weather front that prevented the smog from rising. The smog, often highly toxic, crept into cinemas and theatres and almost all public buildings. Only the Underground was spared. An estimated 4,000 people died as a result, most of them elderly with bronchial disease, some from collisions. The calamity led directly to the Clean Air Act of 1956, which restricted coal burning in urban areas, relocated power stations and encouraged alternative sources for domestic heating. It was one of the first significant acts of environmental urban planning.
211 Between mid-August and late-October 1953, Jean abandoned her usual pattern of writing to consider the teachings of the Indian mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti. Jean had been to see Krishnamurti (or K. as she often referred to him) deliver a lecture in London, and was impressed with his spiritual insights and detached, calming aura. (His teachings were later regarded as significant influences on both Nehru after independence and Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. Krishnamurti died in 1986 at the age of ninety. Aldous Huxley had been similarly captivated, writing that seeing him had been ‘like listening to a discourse of the Buddha’.) His teachings were not entirely new to her: Krishnamurti was in his late fifties, and was a leading Theosophist. He had written several books on the importance of the individual psychological change that was required to bring about greater transformations in society. In her journal, her 33rd, Jean attempted to suspend the record of regular passing thoughts, and strove instead for a deeper understanding of her nature and her actions.
She was aided in her quest by a new literary approach: she wrote out in red ink some of the more salient passages delivered from talks Krishnamurti had given the previous year in his base at Ojai, California, and she would then consider how his observations reflected or may enhance her own life (in her regular blue-black ink). One may detect an early manifestation of mindfulness. These entries were dated, but were effectively written as one sustained meditation.
212 The phrase dates as far back as the 1830s, and was popular in the arguments promoting a more progressive Poor Law.
213 A guinea was £1 and 1 shilling. Gilbert Harding was an irascible journalist and presenter, a favourite on the panel show What’s My Line?
43. The Colour of Nurses
214 A courtroom thriller featuring a spritely Arnold Ridley, Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army.
215 Jean’s cleaner.
216 This was the first production of Separate Tables. Phyllis played the demonic Sybil Railton-Bell, and reprised the role when the play transferred to the West End (where Jean saw it) and Broadway. In a later production, the part was played by Julie Christie.
217 See 19 October 1947.
218 The horoscope was pasted onto the first page of her 35th journal. One line was marked with ink: ‘Your income is likely to increase before the autumn’. The front of the journal also contained a small piece of paper with some crossword markings, the name ‘Dr Whoe’, and a quote from Socrates: ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life’.
219 Dell’s popular romantic novels included The Knave of Diamonds and The Way of an Eagle.
220 In June 1957, Jean added a footnote: ‘A book on Eliz Myers by Eleanor Farjeon is coming out this summer.’
221 Before Jean became interested, the most notable purchaser for Odney pots was John Lewis of Oxford Street.
44. Hags and Bitches
222 D’Oyly Carte specialised in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.
223 W.G.: Probably a reference to the shop’s founding brothers and the firm’s original name: W & G Foyle Ltd.
224 In fact, much of it seemed to be the wrong colour from the scheme she envisioned in early February. In a later entry, Jean notes that the landlord has painted it in dark brown, pale cream and turquoise. ‘I sit facing wall, not door.’
225 ICBT is Jean’s second attempt at a cat book, a more expansive guide than the first, with illustrations by her friend E.D. and some semi-professional photographs. Frederick Muller Ltd was a British publisher most fondly remembered for producing the first Doctor Who books.
226 Formulated by the German-born Americanised nutritionist Gayelord Hauser in the 1930s, it promoted what we may now regard as a cornerstone of good nutrition: low sugar and white flour intake, plenty of vitamins. Jean may have been reading his most recent publication, the 1955 slimming manual Gayelord Hauser’s New Guide to Intelligent Reducing.
227 She wasn’t a friend, but was born and grew up a few miles from Jean. She was popular in her day, and was later championed as a significant feminist writer.
228 The name is uncertain; possibly a customer in the shop.
229 An existentialist study in artistic and social alienation, it was flavour of the year for a generation still finding its way towards a modern future.
230 This is Jean’s oblique reference to the Suez Crisis. The petrol blockade in the Middle East had led to the introduction of petrol rationing on 17 December, restricting private cars to travel only about 200 miles a month. The rationing lasted until May 1957.
231 Angus Wilson was indeed gay, and made no secret of this when he worked at Bletchley Park as a code-breaker during the war.
45. Terminex
232 The journal contains a cutting from the Windsor, Slough and Eton Express dated Friday, 18 October 1957. Above a small photo of Jean, the headline ran: ‘She’s Woman Parish Council Clerk No 4’. The article began: ‘In a few weeks time a slight, dark-haired woman will have her first opportunity of coping with what until recently has been an all-male task. She is Miss Jean Pratt, of Wee Cottage, Egypt, who was recently appointed clerk to Farnham Common Parish Council. Already well known in the area as proprietor of a small but intriguing bookshop in the Broadway, Farnham Common, Miss Pratt is thrilled with her new job: “I never dreamed of doing such a task. I knew they needed a new clerk, and when Mr Sachs, who is on the council and comes into the bookshop regularly, asked me if I would like to take over – I agreed.”’ The article explained that the shop was going well, and that Jean also volunteered to campaign for the Liberal Party, was a member of the village dramatic society, and, when time allowed, bred short-haired British blues.
233 The fictional WW2-era priest created by Giovannino Guareschi.
234 The weekly trade magazine offering bookseller directories, library information and lists of rare and out-of print publications.
235 The loan terms at Jea
n’s library were elaborate, a scheme involving ‘A’ category and ‘B’ category books and a subscription service offering two ‘A’ books or three ‘B’ books for £3 7s. 6d. a year, or two ‘B’ books at a time for £2 2s. Other options were available. (‘Romances * Thrillers * Westerns*’, her leaflets proclaimed. ‘Change as often – keep as long – as you like! No fines.’)
236 It still exists. Pub quiz every other Tuesday.
237 Mitchison was a successful novelist and active socialist. Like Jean, she kept a wartime diary for Mass Observation.
238 See 5 December 1955.
239 Wildeblood was a writer and television producer, but it was his frankness as a campaigning homosexual (when such a thing was still illegal) that made him famous. In a distant echo of the trial of Oscar Wilde, in the mid-1950s Wildeblood was prosecuted with two others for inciting indecent acts with men, and the case was instrumental in the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report of 1957 that homosexuality between consenting adults be decriminalised. West End People was a satirical novel of gangland Soho.
240 The origin of N.’s pseudonym is unclear. Her subtitle is ‘A Book for Young People of All Ages’. Judging by the number of editions, the book sold well.
241 Jean had been eyeing this site for a few years with a view to expansion. It was a larger shop on the Broadway, the main thoroughfare in Farnham Common.
242 Any Questions began on BBC Radio in 1948.
243 Anthony Eden, Conservative prime minister 1955–57, undone by the Suez Crisis.
244 The Turn of the Tide was an annotated collection of diaries kept by 1st Viscount Alanbrooke (edited by Arthur Bryant) during the war; it was highly critical of Churchill. Born Free was Joy Adamson’s moving account of protecting lion cubs in Africa.
245 Paraphrasing Carl Jung.
246 She bought a 1947 Ford Prefect for £40. Immediately afterwards, it was in a garage in Beaconsfield being fitted with a new engine. She called it Freddie. ‘I think it will prove a good partnership,’ she noted two months after it arrived, ‘but it will take time. I’m fairly sure I could get to Slough and back now.’
46. Gloss and Plastic and What Have You
247 From January 1963 to May 1986 Jean wrote only six slim journals. She didn’t admonish herself for the long intervals between entries; she now regarded her diary as something to slip into only when the occasion arose, a rarer comfort.
248 ‘Ruined by Rust? Then you haven’t used Jenolite!’ ran the advert in the Practical Householder from 1956.
249 Her solicitor R.P., the husband of her equally mysterious friend B.P., is praised by Jean elsewhere: ‘He was chosen to sit on the Government’s Committee now going into the landlord racketeer problem (Peter Rachman), and has to negotiate very big deals indeed for his own firm. He should have no time for me at all, but the just spirit still exists and has its powers also. R. himself has great integrity and despises the get-rich-quick contingent and I think he enjoys fighting them.’
250 This was the M40, which began construction two years later in 1967.
251 Uttley was the author of A Traveller in Time and such popular children’s stories as The Squirrel, The Hare and the Little Grey Rabbit, Little Grey Rabbit’s Washing Day, Sam Pig and His Fiddle, and other adventures enjoyed by the Little Grey Rabbit and Sam Pig. But it wasn’t all softness and cuteness. Uttley also kept personal diaries, in which she expressed a marked distaste for some of her illustrators. Jean notes later that the visit was a great success, and the two became friends.
252 The new name of her local art gathering.
253 Snagge was an old-school BBC newsreader (although when he began in the 1920s he was new-school).
254 In June, Edward Heath defeated the government of Harold Wilson by 330 seats to 288. The Liberals, led by Jeremy Thorpe, had suffered a disaster, winning only 6 seats (at the previous election they had won 12). When it was over, the Liberals again rallied for proportional representation.
47. Slough of Despond
255 Decimal Day: the UK and Ireland changed from pounds, shillings and pence (£, s. & d.) to decimal currency, moving from 240 pence in the pound to 100. Despite months of advance warning and educational programmes, the public and banks appeared surprised by the finality of it all and confused by practicalities. There were no longer 12 pence in the shilling and 20 shillings in the pound. Tourists and the international exchanges found life easier; everyone else seemed to feel that the ‘rounding up’ that occurred inevitably worked against them.
256 Harry Williams, an Anglican monk, wrote several bestsellers exploring alternative religious paths.
257 Leslie was a career diplomat and the first cousin of Winston Churchill. His memoir of 1916 considered not only his family life, but also the future for English and Irish society at an uncertain time.
258 Pyrford in Surrey, Babs’s new home, was a thirty-mile trip.
48. Now We Know
259 Surmontil is still prescribed for serious depression and insomnia, and is known generically as Trimipramine.
260 Batsford specialised in games and gardening books.
261 In the 1970s, Super Tax stood at up to 83 per cent of earnings, and was responsible for the ‘brain drain’, higher earners leaving the country for lower tax bands abroad.
262 The play, in which a woman leaves her husband for another woman, was regarded as a watershed in gay drama. The BBC pronounced itself proud to broadcast a play about such a controversial topic, but then refused to air the repeat in the afternoon lest it cause offence.
263 In the space of a few weeks she visited, after much agonising over the driving, her brother in Byfleet, Lydia in the Cotswolds, Babs and Roy in their new home in Dorset, and Joan and Vahan in Radlett. Still no sign of N.
264 The summer of 1976 was a ‘hottest since records began’ event, and will not be forgotten by those who lived through it. Droughts, forest fires, hosepipe bans, water-rationing, washing up bowls emptied on parched gardens, campaigns to ‘bathe with a friend’, joy at Wall’s Ice Cream.
265 In addition to his career as an actor, Gus invented the literary character Miss Emily Seeton, an art teacher whose sketches help a team of detectives solve crimes. Classified as ‘cosy mystery thrillers’, the series ran to five novels with Heron Carvic as pseudonymous author, with other authors reviving Miss Seeton after Gus’s death in 1980. Under his real name Geoffrey Harris, Gus is better known to sci-fi and fantasy connoisseurs as the voice of Morpho in early episodes of Doctor Who (with William Hartnell as The Doctor), and as Gandalf in the BBC 1968 radio version of The Hobbit.
266 No journals survive from 1977 and 1978, but there is no suggestion from subsequent entries that Jean didn’t maintain them. Her brother Pooh died from heart failure during this time, and she planned her retirement from the shop – both of which she would have written about decisively. Her remaining years are catalogued in just two journals, and it is indeed mostly a catalogue: weather reports, gardening updates, cat shows negotiated, meals destroyed when she dozed with the oven on, doctors’ visits. Several times she questions why she is making her more cursory entries at all (it is no longer habit, but increasingly a resilience; her endurance is now one of her strongest assets).
267 A very old friend from architecture school, who now helps Jean run the shop. Elsewhere, Jean describes their relationship as consistently ‘stormy’, stemming, perhaps, from the days when Jean threw a watering can at her from a Hampstead rooftop when they were starting out.
268 Jean writes on the newspaper cutting: ‘No! A mid-day gathering for sherry and nibbles’.
269 Jean wrote only a few disjointed entries between October 1982 and May 1985. Her handwriting became larger and scratchier, though her mood remained steady, even content. Medical drama was limited to her eyes; she needed an urgent cataract removal, and was delighted to find that her NHS specialist at the Prince Charles Unit at Windsor was Dr Richard Packard, the same man who operated on Mrs Thatcher’s detached retina. There is no mention of a seri
ous operation she refers back to in her final entries. She managed to attend the Olympia cat show each December and spend two Christmases with Babs and Roy in Taunton. Developers continued to sniff again around her shop, and were particularly interested in the garden area, which they hoped to convert into a car park. The second-hand bookshop established when Jean retired to the back office failed to pay its way, and was replaced by a jeweller; there is passing mourning too for the disappearance of her local haberdashery and ironmongery shops. Amid much upheaval at Wee, Jean had a new bathroom installed with a knotty pine finish. Three cats left.
270 Jean is 76.
271 A commonly used anti-inflammatory steroid.
272 Herbalife was founded in 1980 with a mission to improve its customers’ diet and health regime through protein shakes and other products. Jean’s new friend Rosalind was apparently one of Herbalife’s local reps: as with Avon, the company relied on a network of personal distributors to boost sales.
273 See footnote on p. 605.
274 Launched in 1979, BCHC proposed an alternative, holistic approach to traditional cancer treatments, focusing on a strict (largely raw) vegetable diet, meditation and other non-invasive therapies. It was tainted with controversy in 1990, when a report in the Lancet suggested that women attending the centre with breast cancer fared worse than those who received conventional treatment only. It is now known as Penny Brohn Cancer Care, after its co-founder, and these days offers a less stringent diet and more of a complementary therapeutic package to run alongside traditional treatments.
275 Added later: ‘No – it didn’t get done.’
Acknowledgements
The task of editing Jean’s writing has been a pleasure. I was frequently grateful for the shared enthusiasm and creative suggestions shown by my agent Rosemary Scoular, my editor Jenny Lord and my wife Justine Kanter. The support for the project shown by the great team at Canongate, led by Jamie Byng and Jenny Todd, has also been unstinting. I would like to thank Seán Costello for his sensitive copy editing, Jake Lingwood for getting the ball rolling more than a decade ago, Martin Bright for making the initial link with Jean’s family, Ella Frears for her careful transcription of several journals, Judy Tipping, John Conen and Paul Townsend for their knowledge and friendship in Farnham Common, and Cats Protection for its current guardianship of Jean’s writing. Finally, thank you to Babs Everett for supplying the photographs, and for placing her faith in me with something so valuable.
A Notable Woman Page 68