Another book that came through Sophie, which I read that winter, was Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. It opens with her sitting alone in her study one day, idly picking up a book and finding herself jolted to attention by a lamentation that all the miseries of marriage (for men) were caused by women. It’s a remarkably modern opening for 1405, but then it shifts into the prolix, allegorical style of the era as she sets about creating a ‘city’ built from the lives of exemplary women. Stone by stone, she demolishes the city of culture and value built over centuries by men who have misjudged the nature of woman and slandered her name. Simone de Beauvoir credits Christine de Pizan with being the first woman ‘to take up her pen in defence of her sex’. She took the clerics to task in ‘a lively attack’ (Beauvoir’s words), and joined the long-running literary ‘quarrel’ over the The Romance of the Rose, objecting to its depiction of women as mere seducers, and the vulgarity of language that reduced women to the vessels of debased sexuality. Not surprisingly she was attacked for all the things women who take on structural misogynies get attacked for. ‘Snubs and chidings’, Virginia Woolf called them centuries later. It was only because Christine de Pizan had had a powerful protector in Isabeau of Bavaria, the wife of Charles VI of France, that she was able to keep writing. She needed to; it was her only source of income after her husband died while on a mission for the French court, leaving her, aged twenty-five, with three children, a mother and a niece to support.
Among the women of de Pizan’s city was Novella, the daughter of a fourteenth-century ‘solemn law professor’ at the University of Bologna, a rare man for his times who ‘was not of the opinion that it was bad for women to be educated’. He educated Novella in the law ‘to such an advanced state that when he was occupied by some task and not at leisure to present his lectures to his students, he would send her in his place’. She would take his chair and ‘a little curtain’ would be drawn in front of her so as not to distract her audience of men. It was a story that made its point centuries later at the table in the house on the corner, for while we’d all had university educations and took our own rooms (and incomes) as granted, very few of our mothers had either a degree or a room of their own. We knew the cost in their lives; I was not the only one whose mother had vanished for several years into a psychiatric ward. As to us, we didn’t sit behind a curtain, we were out there parading, or so we thought, but in our dealings with the world of men, our university colleagues as well as our lovers, there were times when we could feel ourselves condemned to live behind a curtain of misapprehension – though in our case it was never quite clear if we were concealed by it, or revealed. Veils and curtains. Either way, in those years after Poppy’s death, long before I encountered Janet Laurence’s veils, Novella’s curtain became a metaphor for how we were seen, or felt ourselves to be seen, or – more to the point – not seen, and therefore not understood.
By the time Christine de Pizan was sixty-five and had retired to a convent at Poissy, she had written forty works – including treatises, allegories and poetry. Her daughter was already living at the convent, and when you read about the conditions of convents before the church got to work ‘reforming’ them into places of poverty, chastity and enclosure, they seem an attractive solution to the problem of retirement. A convent was where women who did not want to marry could go – I’m talking of educated women here, I admit; there was a whole other class of serving nuns – taking with them their furnishings, their books, their clothes. With their own rooms they could entertain visitors – including lovers it’s sometimes said but I don’t know if that’s actually the case, or wishful later thinking. What is for sure is that the medieval convents were where women could, and did, live an intellectual life of writing and study, companionship as well as retreat. Virginia Woolf’s radical argument – in 1929 – that everything depends (if you are a woman) on having some money of one’s own as well as a room of one’s own – which no longer seems radical to those of us in the educated West who can assume both – has antecedents most of us know little about.
As does Sophie’s housing association work. Looked at from today, all that collective talk might seem naïve and idealistic, very 1970s, but it, too, was built on a legacy now forgotten. From the early nineteenth century, as housing stock and family patterns changed from old forms of extended, more communal living, there were reformers, many of them women, who saw the isolating implications of the move towards the little boxes Pete Seeger would sing of in the 1960s. Thanks to Sophie, I can tell you that in 1848 Jane Sophia Appleton, ‘a housewife in Bangor USA’, described the cities she imagined we’d be inhabiting by 1978. There’d be communal kitchens and laundries, efficiencies of scale: quiet, ordered, under the control of the women working in them – and certain of success. Gone would be ‘the absurdity of one hundred housekeepers, one hundred girls in the process of making pies for one hundred little ovens’.2 I suppose you could say the market has taken over the idea and efficiencies of the communal kitchen – though not the idea of keeping them in the control of women; it has also taken over the housing, making our little boxes ever more desirable, and increasingly out of reach. Sophie joked that she hoped, for Jane Sophia’s sake, that there was no reincarnation. But Sophie knew, we both knew, that somewhere between rooms of our own, communal kitchens and collective housing, between companionship and the space to be our own thinking selves, lay the question of how we were to live.
Given my allegorical frame of mind and state of avoidance, I gathered up these stories, and more. Jane Sophia Appleton and Christine de Pizan, Novella behind her curtain, as well as Teresa Hawkins and her creator Christina Stead who’d left Sydney for London in 1928 on her own quest for love, became bricks in the city of women I built from the comfort of a chair. No stonemasons or slaves hauling huge slabs of rock across deserts for me; not even the plumbing Sophie had done back in those squatting days, though I had spent a few days, that’s all, with a paint roller at the Women’s Refuge in Glebe when, in 1974, it had opened in two of the many derelict houses that belonged to the church. That winter when I took leave from teaching and was supposed to be writing, I was doing nothing so vigorous – though the way it felt, reading and thinking and walking for miles each day, writing in my head and then eventually in the notebooks that filled with a messy scrawl, I may as well have been running barrows of bricks up a steep ramp. At night, I slept as if I had.
After two decades of reading my way into the Pacific and then into this strange antipodean place in which I seemed to be making a life, I returned to writers of my birth country. This was less the influence of Sophie than of Dorothy Auchterlonie Green, one of the few women of my mother’s generation here in Australia to whom I could turn for advice. She had read my PhD thesis on that remarkable generation of Australian women writing between the wars. While my official examiners – historians, not literary scholars like her – wrote glowing reports, all very satisfactory to the ego, Dorothy invited me to visit her in Canberra. I sat with her for an afternoon in a room that looked out over a garden full of birdsong while she went through the thesis heavy on her knee, pointing to slippages of meaning, words carelessly used, pushing me further on the novels I’d written about, and asking tough questions about the way I’d understood (or not) the lives of the women who’d written in those years between the wars – when she was a girl and had read them as part of her growing into her own writing and living. It was an exhilarating, exhausting afternoon in which I felt challenged, a double-edged sensation that didn’t allow me the satisfaction of staying with those official reports. By the time Dorothy closed the thesis and took off her glasses, I was feeling distinctly wilted.
‘Well, dear girl,’ she said, getting up to put on the kettle, ‘I think we deserve some tea.’
For a moment I thought she was going to say we deserved a whisky, but tea came, I helped her with the tray and a plate of biscuits. The mood shifted and we talked until the light faded and it was time for me to leave.
At the door she complimented me on the thesis she’d just picked apart and told me there were things there that were worth saying. I must have looked at her blankly.
‘Dear girl,’ she said again. ‘A word of advice. When you rewrite this as a book’ – the hefty volume now weighing on my arm – ‘don’t look over your shoulder.’
That was Dorothy: exacting and enabling, in a neat blouse with a brooch at the neck.
After that she became a mentor and a friend. I visited her in Canberra and she came to the house on the corner, sometimes staying the night in the quickly tidied-up room at the back. The only time I saw a mouse in that house was at breakfast one morning with Dorothy. The mouse appeared from under the stairs and there it was in the doorway. I tried to keep Dorothy’s attention on the teapot and the toast, but the mouse took its time, sauntering across the room and into the kitchen. Dorothy of course noticed and watched its progress across the matting. It’s always good, she said, to be reminded that we cohabit in our houses.
When I was stuck, reading more than I was writing, I wrote her letters and she wrote long, serious replies. Reading was essential to the work of writing, she said. I shouldn’t consider it lost time. I couldn’t talk to her as the young talk to me, not of sex, and only cautiously of love, though she knew there’d been an unhappy love affair and that my mother had died. She knew there was a crisis, and though I saw the sympathy in the way she looked at me, her advice and help came through books. You’ve been here for how many years? she once asked. And in that time you’ve read novels from the Pacific and from here. What have you read from the place you were born, and where your mother was born? Not much since school, I said. Go back, she said. Go back to the mothers, to the world yours was born into and that you came from. She meant in my reading, not on a plane, but that, too, I needed to do.
3
It was Dorothy who put Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth in my hand, sending me back to my grandmother’s generation and the war both she and my mother were born in the shadow of – Dorothy in 1915, its dark second year, and Poppy in 1924 after the killing was done. The Great War, it was called, a savage and senseless war which sliced through a generation, killing millions of young men, damaging millions more in myriad, horrible ways, and leaving tens of thousands of young women without men to marry. Superfluous, the women were called.
Vera Brittain was nineteen when the war began in 1914. She was due to start at Somerville College, Oxford, that autumn. Her brother Edward was seventeen, a prime age to enlist, which he did with his two best friends from school. For these soft-faced boys – barely yet men – there was no question but to enlist. A fellow student who survived the war later described the mood of ‘appalling jingoism’ at their school, with the headmaster telling the boys that if a man couldn’t serve his country he was better off dead. When Vera went up to Oxford, Edward, Roland and Victor, whom she’d known since they were twelve, went to officers’ training camp, full of patriotism, expecting the war to be short and heroic. It was neither. All three would be killed: first Roland at the end of 1915, then Victor in 1917, and last Edward, just months before the armistice. ‘The three musketeers’, Roland’s mother had called them.
Vera and Roland, already sweethearts, became engaged the summer of 1915 while he was in London on leave. She was nursing by then, having given up her place at Somerville, much to the dismay of the formidable College Principal, Miss Emily Penrose. Many a woman could nurse at the front, was Miss Penrose’s argument; in the longer run, was it not more important to educate women into positions of power that might make war less likely? We might sigh at her optimism, having lived to see women in positions of power; the problem with Mrs Thatcher, Dorothy Green used to say, wasn’t that she was a woman who wanted to be a man, but a woman who wanted to be a General. That was a future Miss Penrose hadn’t envisaged. For her generation, the education of women had been hard fought – and was not yet won. In 1914, when Vera Brittain began at Oxford, women could study for a degree and take the exams; it was not until after the war, in 1920, that they were finally allowed full degree status. Vera Brittain understood Miss Penrose’s argument – how could she not – but the counter-pull was stronger: a kind of ‘accursed’ generational duty to ‘listen and look’ whether she wanted to or not, and share, in so far as she could, the fate of her male contemporaries. She spent the rest of the war nursing. By the time Roland was expected back in England on a second leave at the end of 1915, she was at the 1st London General Hospital ‘amid the slums of Camberwell Green’ in south-east London, where wounded soldiers were brought from the front in France. It was tough work, with long hours, bleak quarters and a daily fare of ugly, festering wounds. The first dressing Vera Brittain had to attend was a ‘gangrenous leg wound, slimy and green and scarlet, with the bone laid bare’. She saw orderlies faint at the sight of less. After months of this, when she heard Roland would be in London for Christmas she treated herself to a new dress – black taffeta ‘with scarlet and mauve velvet flowers tucked into the waist’ – and ‘dashed joyously’ to the phone expecting to hear his voice. She learned instead of his death at a Casualty Clearing Station in France. It was early on Christmas morning, 1915. She had just come off night duty.
Two months later Roland’s kit was returned to his parents, including the uniform – ‘those poor remnants of patriotism’ – which he was wearing when his stomach took the impact of a machine gun. ‘I wondered,’ she wrote, ‘and I wonder still, why it was thought necessary to return such relics – the tunic torn back and front by the bullet, a khaki vest dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of blood-stained breeches slit open at the top by someone obviously in a violent hurry.’3 She was glad neither Edward nor Victor was there to see them.
These days Camberwell Green is no longer an area of slums – my niece Amy lives there, in a Victorian terrace in a street lined with trees and window boxes – but in 1915, after Roland’s death, the drab area and the mile and a half walk between the hospital and the nurses’ quarters at Denmark Hill became unbearable to Vera Brittain. She volunteered for an overseas posting, including in France as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse at a front-line hospital near Étaples. It was not an easy option, in some ways rather masochistic, she admits, as if suffering could only be borne with more suffering. At Étaples, within sound of the guns, a third of the men were dying: unstoppable haemorrhages, heads torn open, ruptured intestines spilling out. Those who could make the journey were sent back to England – which is what happened to Victor, the next of the three friends to die. In April 1917, during an attack on Arras, he took a bullet in the head, which blinded him, and another in the arm, rendering it useless. Vera managed to return to England in time to spend a few days with a young man she’d known since she was a girl, yet barely recognised at the hospital where he died that June.
While I was reading Testament of Youth, I’d wonder aloud at our table if I – if any of us – would have had the courage, the stamina – psychological as well as physical – to keep on working in those hospitals month after month with little in their rooms for solace but ‘a candle stuck in the neck of a bottle, a tiny flame flickering in an ice-cold draught’.4 Imagining ourselves into those hospitals – where the nurses were not allowed to sit down while on the ward – was not a good method for considering history, but we did it anyway. We knew the cost of war. We’d grown up with the names of great-uncles and grandfathers killed in that first war; sepia photos on the walls. Our fathers had fought in the next war, and those of us born in England as it ended had seen the bomb damage, and could remember rationing: eggs counted out singly, a small dab of butter, a scoop of sugar. We were not yet out of primary school when we saw the images from the concentration camps; we’d held our breath through the Cuban Missile Crisis, old enough to understand the threat. When I read Vera Brittain’s account of being ‘pitch-forked’ into a ward for German wounded as soon as she arrived at the hospital camp, within sound of the guns, I thought of my father, who had been
in Burma at the end of the next war, pushing the Japanese back one dugout at a time. One of the few war stories he told was of the day they found a young enemy soldier, a boy still in his teens, crouched among the corpses, weeping with the humiliation of not having been able to take his own life. Like Vera Brittain holding the hand of dying German soldiers, my father had done what he could to comfort the boy even as he took him prisoner.
I read Vera Brittain with personal, and very English, eyes, acutely aware that when she and her close friend, the writer Winifred Holtby, had toured the defeated regions of Germany in the autumn of 1924, it was within weeks of my mother’s birth. I was aware, too, that they were witnessing the humiliation – ‘the long reaping in sorrow of that which was sown in pride’5 – that would grow to become the Second World War, soon after the end of which my mother would be pregnant with me, living alone in a small cottage in Shropshire with no electricity, and a pony and trap to take her into town, while my father returned to Burma to ‘mop up’, an oddly domestic image that had him, in my imagination, standing at the entrance to that dugout with a cloth mop and an old metal bucket.
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